http://blog.lenovo.com/
enKristy FairCopyright 20142014-10-30T13:30:00+00:00http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/lenovo-painting-live-socially-fed-artwork-at-mobile-world-congress
http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/lenovo-painting-live-socially-fed-artwork-at-mobile-world-congress#When:19:05:00ZNot everyone is in Barcelona right now for Mobile World Congress, but for those that are, you may have noticed something very colorful going on in the little corner of the world that is Lenovo Booth #3n30. A mural, painted with bright colors, is being created by notorious graffiti artist GR170.

Mr. GR170 isn’t just painting for the sake of painting – he’s painting out colorful depictions of Lenovo’s three proprietary applications (SHAREit, REACHit, WRITEit). But it’s more than that. Over the course of three days, he’ll continue painting the mural, adding real-time, user submitted content that is coming in from users via social media.

This living, interactive artwork is a collaboration between the DOit Apps and Lenovo Vibe teams: and it’s going quite well so far. There’ve been over 2,329 Tweets associated with the hashtag #MWCreativity so far, and you can check out the submissions by clicking here.

Day 1 – March 2nd: Take A Crazy Selfie Challenge.

Day one started off with a bang: we challenged attendees and Lenovo fans across the globe to submit their best, crazy selfie ideas on Twitter. While dozens of entries came in, only one could win. And in this case, it was @Satishkulki. Who is now immortalized for all of time within our mural:

Day 2 – March 3rd: Shadow Puppet Time.

Day two, today, is off and running. The challenge was to create interesting shadow puppets – and users are running with it:

Who will win? It wouldn’t be polite to say. But we’ll comment on this much: we’re digging the brontosaurus.

Day 3 – March 4th: ???

What does the future hold? Tune in tomorrow, March 4th, by checking out @DOitApps on Twitter, or by browsing for the hashtag #MWCreativity.

The Future, and Beyond!

We brought mimes and mariachis to CES, Appy Hour to Raleigh, and artists to MWC. But it’s only the beginning. Expect more. We’re #DOERS.

Guest blog by Jeff Meredith, Vice President and General Manager, Tablets, Mobile Business Group.

At CES, we debuted the YOGA Tablet 2 with Windows featuring AnyPen Technology. Long name, but the product was a hit. What makes it particularly interesting besides the different modes of the tablet is the ability to write literally with any pen, or pencil, or even as we discovered, organic edibles like a carrot. We introduced this technology first on the 8-in Windows tablet, and it makes complete sense for users who need a better way to write and use Office documents to work on a small, compact tablet.

Now at Mobile World Congress, we’re demonstrating how this technology works now on Android. We got a lot of feedback after CES about putting it on Android. While we aren’t announcing it on a particular product just yet, we are showing off this technology. Think about it. No matter the operating system, there are times when a pen just works better. Drawing a picture. Taking notes with Evernote. Creating a mindmap to brainstorm or organize your thoughts. Even editing photos and using apps that rely on writing.

So what did we do under the hood to make it work?
Let’s start behind the touch display glass. Behind it there are two layers of film that act like a coordinate system tracking the location of your finger. Think of it like plotting points using an X and Y-axis, similar to what we learned in school. Most tablets are great at registering where your finger is placed on the screen, but in general, they lack the ability to register smaller objects like a pen or stylus. Tablets are tuned to recognize a finger's contact with the display, meaning smaller objects geet picked up as noise.

With AnyPen, we’ve solved the noise problem and improved how the display film registers signals from both larger objects like finger tips, as well as smaller objects like a pen. On the film layer, the channel inputs have been organized in a pattern that can now recognize the use of inputs as small as 1mm. So that means where you could previously only use it with your fingers, now you can use a variety of objects as input methods.

This is only step one. The noise problem I mentioned earlier still exists. Imagine trying to write on the display and the tablet gets confused every time your hand accidentally touches it. The solution must feel natural.

To solve this, we incorporated a specialized IC (integrated circuit) capable of receiving all channel inputs. Then it quickly determines which is the input and which is actually noise. By doing this, we can now process in real-time, delivering a more natural experience to users. We’re continuing to improve this technology to bring it to new platforms in the future.

So the obvious questions are when will you sell Android with AnyPen? And which products will you put it on? Right now, we’re just demoing the technology on Android, but stay tuned for more on this story. We’ve started with an 8-in screen on the YOGA Tablet 2 running Windows since it’s in between smartphones and PCs at a size where you would benefit from using a stylus. But, I want to hear what you think. Would you use a pen to do email on your phone? Or should we look at bigger screen tablets and/or PCs? Send me your votes and comments.

Pen Gets Better with WRITEit
Let’s switch gears back to Windows 8.1. If you came to CES, you may have heard about WRITEit. It’s a software application we created in-house to better the handwriting experience on any, not just Lenovo, Windows 8 touch screen and pen-enabled laptops, desktops and tablets. We set out to have WRITEit do three things: let users write directly into text fields, work across multiple types of devices and give real-time feedback and auto-correction.

I’m pleased to report the beta for WRITEit on ThinkPad laptops that use pen is now live and we’re signing up users here: www.getwriteit.com for the beta on capacitive devices like our YOGA Tablet 2 with AnyPen.

WRITEit lets you write nearly anywhere. No more having to use the Windows IME to input text into designated handwriting boxes within apps. Now you can write your input directly into nearly any field that accepts typed input, and we think this makes handwriting a much more natural and ubiquitous means of input. I’ve been testing it for months, and I can tell you I use it most for initiating web searches and responding to emails in Outlook. There’s no lag time, and it has auto correction to help catch typos.

Here's a video demo of what we're showing folks at Mobile World Congress this week. Take a look and let us know what you think!

Have you ever bought a piece of clothing that sported a label confidently declaring, “One Size Fits All?” If so, then you might remember just how many nanoseconds it took after you put the garment on for you to realize that the label should have stated, “One Size Fits All – (Almost)” or “One Size Really Fits Someone Else.” The one-size-fits-all concept works well in theory, but in actuality, it rarely comes without compromise.

Compromise isn’t necessarily a good thing in a data center environment. That’s why Lenovo and Microsoft have worked together to design optimized data warehouse solutions for Microsoft SQL Server, one of the industry’s leading platforms for mission-critical applications. These are balanced pretested data warehouse configurations in a variety of sizes. Now, an entire range of organizations from small businesses to enterprises, all with a host of diverse data warehousing needs, won’t all have to “shoe horn” into one solution. These reliable pretested solutions, known as Microsoft Data Warehouse Fast Track for SQL Server 2014 or DWFT, not only help data center leaders decrease risk and implementation costs, but also enable them to accelerate deployment.

Lenovo and Microsoft have zeroed in on three sizes of DWFTs -- a large 60TB solution on Lenovo’s X6 enterprise family of servers, a medium-sized 20TB solution, and at the small end of the range, a 5TB solution designed for small businesses. In designing these DWFT solutions for data warehouse leaders, the two companies have made the deployment process simpler and faster, shortened the time and effort required for testing and tuning, awarding a certified performance rating and more. Each of the DWFT offerings is designed to support future growth and maximize the value of a company’s data center investment.

In the case of the high end offering, for example, the Lenovo x3950 X6 server is the platform on which the DWFT is typically hosted. X6 servers are designed for four enterprise workloads including analytics; database; business logic, ERP and CRM; and virtualization. The X6 platform delivers 12TB of memory, three times more than the maximum memory of the versions of Windows and SQL Server on the market today. The powerful 8-socket X6 server has more than enough capacity to support not only today’s enterprise-grade databases, but also room to grow with the future iterations of Windows and SQL Server software that ultimately will support more memory.

Another sizing consideration – the slowest in data warehouse configurations -- is I/O. x3950 X6 servers are designed for the kind of high throughput required for data warehousing -- from processor to memory to I/O. This platform is perfect for consolidating a number of established, mature SQL Server workloads running on separate servers. (In an outdated data center environment, underutilization and wasted space, power and cooling may also be concerns that are resolved with the X6 platform.)

We’ve kicked off the Mobile World Congress 2015, and you’d never have guessed that some of our products made it here just in the nick of time, after spending the past few weeks globetrotting across the world! They’re feeling fresh after stopping by several countries and regions to recharge (as products do), and can’t wait to get their keys tapping again.

If you’re a whiz at World Geography, you’re in luck because we’d like you to guess #whereintheworld our products have been. (Great Googling skills might help too)

We’ll be releasing the first location clue on our global Twitter @lenovo handle on Tuesday 3 March. From there, take a guess where the next destination is, then head to the corresponding Lenovo country Twitter handle for your next clue. Here's how:

For example, if the clue indicates Germany as the destination, head to @lenovode’s Twitter handle to see if you got it right. You will also find the next clue there. (Hint: The devices did not stop by in Germany for some Bratwursts)

There will be two clues released on 3 March, and another two on 4 March. Once you’ve figured out all four locations, tweet them in the correct order, using the hashtag #whereintheworld and mention @lenovo by the end of Thursday 5 March.

7 lucky sleuths will be awarded a #LenovoSurprise each. Pssst… we also heard that retweeting every clue along the way increases your chances of getting chosen.

SAP HANA is an in-memory, column-oriented, relational database management system designed to handle both high transaction rates and complex query processing on the same platform. SAP HANA converges database and application platform capabilities in-memory to transform transactions, analytics, text analysis, predictive and spatial processing so businesses can operate in real-time.

SAP HANA investments in architecture and technology, and in creating an ecosystem of applications, skills and third-party support, have encouraged rapid adoption worldwide. In high performance analytics, SAP HANA has been shown to deliver levels of performance that exceed by hundreds or thousands of times – those of conventional platforms for SAP Business Warehouse (BW).

At the end of second quarter 2014, according to SAP, more than 3,600 customers had licensed SAP HANA, including 1,200 that had deployed SAP Business Suite on this platform.

The X6 Solution for SAP HANA helps you make faster, more informed decisions, even with escalating data loads. The reason is that the solution is designed to maximize your system performance to provide a smarter, more efficient approach to resource management. This results in excellent SAP HANA application value.

X6 Cost of Ownership Advantage:

A study done by International Technology Group (ITG) on the cost/benefit of SAP HANA deployments found the Lenovo X6 servers to be the lowest cost solution for scale-out deployments.

For 4-, 8- and 12-node clusters built around 4-processor servers with 512 gigabyte (GB) RAM, costs for use of System x solution for SAP HANA average 20 percent less than for equivalent Cisco offerings.

For the same configurations built around 4-processor servers with 1 terabyte (TB) RAM, X6 average 26 percent less than for HP ConvergedSystem 500.

For 12- and 16-node clusters built around 8-processor servers, costs for use of System x solution for SAP HANA average 31 percent less than for use of HP ConvergedSystem 900.

Costs include hardware, maintenance, licenses and support for vendor-supplied software tools, and facilities costs including data center occupancy and power consumption. Costs of SAP software and implementation are not included.

The System x X6 enterprise servers are designed to provide faster performance and support for more memory. Using self-contained compute books SAP HANA on X6 is purpose-built to support large scale SAP HANA deployments by incorporating:

Up to 120 cores per server for maximum CPU performance.

Scalability up to 224 nodes

Proven expansion capacity to scale up to a 100 TB SAP HANA system

SAP HANA on X6 helps clients make faster, more informed decisions, even with escalating data loads. The reason is that the solution is designed to maximize your system performance to provide a smarter, more efficient approach to resource management. This results in excellent SAP HANA application value.

Running on fast and powerful new System x3850 X6 or x3950 X6 enterprise servers, SAP HANA software can play a critical role in providing the business insights you need from your SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (BWA) and SAP Business Suite data.

Merkl IT delivers cloud-based services to mid-sized companies across Europe from its home in Munich. Like all MSPs, Merkl knows that the key to success is the balance between delivering outstanding client service and keeping costs down. To accomplish this, Merkl sought a solution that would eliminate mundane, time-consuming tasks from their administrators, and allow them to focus on developing new services for their clients.

Physical scalability, (adding more servers and storage), was only part of the battle for Merkl. They needed to be able to implement an entire solution quickly and reliably, to respond to client needs. Merkl chose Flex System with x240 compute nodes from Lenovo over Cisco and HP solutions. According to Maximilian Merkl, Managing Partner, “Our IaaS and SaaS customers benefit from the outstanding reliability of the Flex System provided by the system’s redundancy.”

Because of the Flex System’s built-in networking infrastructure, Merkl was able to reduce cabling by 80 percent, which sped up physical deployment. And, with Flex System’s integrated design, they were able to cut their provisioning time in half. All of which helped Merkl to cut their response time in half while increasing client satisfaction.

We’re seeing a revolution in data center networking — particularly in hyperscale cloud data centers such as those run by Amazon and Google. Soon this impact will be felt in enterprise data centers as these new connectivity environments are becoming more and more relevant. Lenovo’s research and experiences in data center environments, as well as feedback gathered from hosting and managed service providers (MSPs), point to the advantages enterprise data center operators will see in the coming years in the form of better agility, centralized management and vendor-independent open standards.

According to SDN Strategies, 87 percent of North America data centers plan to implement software-defined networking (SDN) by 2016. The majority are conducting SDN lab trials or will do so this year, and 45 percent are planning to have SDN in live production in 2015. These are compelling statistics.

Simply put, the network today is not responsive enough to the dynamic needs of the business. The process of adding new users or applications is far too cumbersome, time consuming and risky — in part due to the requirement to propagate any changes to all of the individual switch elements in a given network. There are a number of strategies for virtualizing the network, including OpenFlow, which is supported by Lenovo Networking. The least invasive of these technologies involves pushing the networking configuration from the hardware up to a higher software level. Often this software is the VMware hypervisor. VMware is adding networking virtualization to its server and storage virtualization offerings via VMware NSX. Similar network virtualization features are available as part of Microsoft HyperV and Linux KVM open- source virtualization. These solutions, collectively known as “overlay networking” move the heavy lifting of configuring the network from the hardware level to the hypervisor — reducing the physical networking hardware and cabling to a simpler role as the “underlay” where speed and connectivity are provided as a service, but without the need to reconfigure to handle new users (tenants) or applications.

A key trait of an agile data center is multitenancy, in which multiple customers (known as tenants), rent space in the data center and expect to be highly isolated from each other. As an example, imagine companies Alpha and Beta both wanting to use the services of same public cloud data center. They must be highly isolated from each other. In doing so, the data center operator (e.g. the hosting company) must ensure that:

Crosstalk between customer networks is prohibited: This is not only to prevent data leakage but also to prevent deliberate (corporate espionage) or accidental attack (via infection)

Tenants do not compromise the cloud network: Customers can do impetuous things, such as opening TCP ports to the rest of the world or using an insecure root or administrator password. A hosting company cannot let a successful attack on a tenant compromise its hosting infrastructure and all of the other tenants along with it.

Achieving this level of isolation with traditional physical networking solutions isn’t easy. How is this done today with physical networking? The answer is likely to have one or more virtual local area networks (VLANs) per tenant, with physical firewall routing/filtering to isolate the VLANs. However, this is not what VLANs were originally intended to do. They were meant to provide a method to subnet IP ranges on a single LAN and control broadcast domains. And in some countries (such as Germany) VLANs are not recognized as secure enough for multi-tenancy in regulated public or financial environments. Somehow, network engineers were convinced to rework VLANs into a security solution. Doing this simply was not scalable for the following reasons:

Networks are limited to 4,096 VLANs. That might sound like a lot, but if a single tenant has two, three, four, or more VLANs then that number does not scale in the competitive hosting world where margins are small and volume is the key to profitability and sustainability.

Maintaining the stability and security of firewalled VLANs at this scale is not a trivial task. Things can get complex quickly in a dynamic environment. Remember that classic networking environments are anything but dynamic. They require manual changes to static configurations that need to be propagated over multiple switches based on the requirements, which in a virtualized server and storage world are constantly changing (vMotion).

What’s been done up to now can be defined as hardware-defined networking. Deploying a new tenant requires a networking engineer to undertake a configuration effort on multiple devices, preventing the essential cloud trait of self-service. This also prevents rapid online provisioning of tenants, which for hosting companies means increased cost (remember that margins are small and human hours are expensive). Innovative provisioning tools — such as OpenStack-based solutions — need to be able to control the network resources in the same way they control those of the (virtualized) server and storage elements.

Software Defined Networking (SDN)

Lenovo Networking has pioneered the interaction of virtual and physical switching over the past few years — from the VMready functionality for the Lenovo Networking operating system introduced in 2009, to the standards effort for Edge Virtual Bridging, culminating in the adoption of the IEEE 802.1Qbg standard.

Lenovo Networking announced a solution to the manual provisioning of network resources as well as a way to overcome the limits of VLANs, called Distributed Overlay Virtual Ethernet (DOVE). The DOVE technology is now part of the open source SDN controller called Open Daylight.

The goal of SDN is to virtualize the network as we have done for servers and storage. Servers nowadays normally exist as software representations, as compared with the computer room of the past, with rows of physical servers that took up lots of rack space and electricity. Today, when someone asks for a server, an IT administrator typically deploys virtual machines. That’s what SDN does for the network: it takes a request for a network and deploys a virtual network (on top of an existing physical network). More precisely, this means deploying a network that doesn’t exist in the physical realm (that is, top-of-rack switches, core switches, etc. requiring configuration on each element) and replacing it with something that exists in the hypervisor, that is, in software. This enables the physical network to be “wired-once”, with subsequent changes to the network infrastructure made in software. The main advantages of adopting this network overlay architecture over classic switching/routing topologies are listed below.

Virtual networks are defined in software: This makes overly networks appropriate for interacting with data center orchestration tools, for example, enabling self-service tenant provisioning (getting tenants to register, deploy services securely and eventually pay) without using human network engineers to deploy VLANs at each step for each case.

Scalability: Virtual networks scale far beyond the restricted quantity limits of VLANs. And software “service chains” including network, firewall and other security and load-balancing services can be defined and re-used for multiple clients — cutting provisioning time drastically.

Simplicity: This is related to scalability. There is no need to configure complicated firewall rules to isolate tenants from each other and the hosting company. This isolation is there by default in the domain structure implemented in the overlay network.

IP Address usage and mobility: The IP address that the tenant uses is irrelevant to the underlay network because it is isolated from it. Different tenants can in fact use overlapping IP addresses yet remain completely isolated from one another.

In summary, by moving the configuration form the hardware switches to the software layer, orchestration tools (such as OpenStack) can take over much of the configuration tasks and automate them in ways that were simply not possible until now.

These are just the basic benefits of overlay networking. In a future blog, we will investigate the role of Lenovo Networking in SDN in more detail, showing how our networking products will work with the overlay and hypervisor vendors to ensure a high-performing, cost-effective and information-rich underlay that will serve as a foundation for the automation of the software-defined data center.

Insiders are encouraged to engage with other members of the community, and are also invited to attend monthly webinars to learn new skills or get exclusive Lenovo news. For their support and participation, Insiders can enjoy unparalleled access to:

Lenovo staff

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Lenovo events

A community of influential voices online

So only a few questions remain. Have you recommended Lenovo to anyone lately? Do you regularly talk about Lenovo products online? Are you a thought leader within your community? If your answer is an enthusiastic “yes,” then you might be a great addition to this community.

Interested candidates should be willing to positively represent the Lenovo brand and commit to participating in the community for at least one year. If you’re ready to dive in and seize this exclusive opportunity, apply for membership here

On February 24, MSPAlliance announced that Lenovo has been designated as a gold vendor member of MSPAlliance for 2015. For all the details, you can read the press release.

Aligning yourself with experienced and trusted associates is a must if you want to be a success. MSPAlliance, with 15 years of cloud & Managed Service Provider (MSP) experience and more than 25,000 corporate members across the globe, is an ideal partner for Lenovo in their drive to become the trusted infrastructure and cloud provider to the Service Provider community. By focusing on providing education, resources and experience to service providers, Lenovo becomes a significant asset to the partner ecosystem that you, our clients rely on.

This is another step in helping Lenovo understand the unique requirements and needs that separate Service Providers from traditional enterprise customers.

One of the first exercises of the partnership is Lenovo’s Platinum Sponsorship of the upcoming MSPWorld Conference in Orlando, Florida.

On March 26-27, Lenovo will be a Platinum Sponsor at MSPWorld, a conference for cloud and managed services professionals. Hosted at the Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center, MSPWorld is an MSPAlliance event. For more information on conference details and how you can join us there, visit http://www.mspworldconference.com/.

As part of the preload on some Lenovo consumer laptops, a piece of third-party software, called Superfish, was preinstalled. Lenovo took immediate action to stop the preloads and began working directly with Superfish and other industry partners to address any possible security issues now and in the future.

To be perfectly clear, this software has never been installed on any Lenovo enterprise product — either System x or ThinkServer-branded offerings. We understand this failure to ensure the proper level of security on some Lenovo consumer laptops may have shaken your overall trust in Lenovo, as well as your confidence in the security of our enterprise products.

We want our System x and ThinkServer clients to be assured. The security of your systems is critical, and our absolute top priority. The Lenovo Enterprise Business Group follows stringent business processes, product design and manufacturing controls to ensure our products are secure. In fact, we believe we go above and beyond what other vendors do concerning system security features and quality procedures.

Business processes – Lenovo’s acquisition of System x was subject to review and approval by the US CFIUS agencies. As a part of that process, Lenovo agreed to maintain the same rigorous development, supply chain processes and controls used by IBM, which includes ensuring that all firmware is securely designed, digitally signed and stored on servers located in the US. In addition, Lenovo agreed to allow the US government to audit these business processes creating what Lenovo believes to be the most transparent, auditable and secure supply chain in the server industry.

Product design – We design our systems with enterprise-level security built-in. Our goal is to deliver the most secure products in the industry. In addition to including the latest x86 industry security standards — including Intel security features and the latest technology from the Trusted Computing Group standards body — we take it a step further and incorporate innovations such as Trusted Platform Assurance. That means, unlike competing servers, System x servers have two dedicated Trusted Platform Modules — one dedicated to the out-of-band systems management interface and one for the host system. These features prevent unauthorized code from being loaded during a system update or while the operating system boots. The Trusted Platform Modules check the digital signature — of all firmware every time it is loaded and before it executes — in order to protect against rogue malware attacks.

Product manufacturing – Like our competitors, Lenovo manufactures servers in locations all around the world; however, Lenovo is the only server vendor to also manufacture servers in the US. We also closely control our supply chain to ensure that our suppliers follow industry-standard security practices for all active components used in our products.

The bottom line is Superfish has no impact on our enterprise products. We know security in the data center is imperative to you, and it’s one of our core strengths. We have always been meticulous about security in the enterprise and will continue to innovate in this area to be a leader in the global market.

How do oceans interact with the atmosphere? What effect do shockwaves have on different materials?

To complement theoretical and experimental methods of answering such fundamental questions about the universe, and with science becoming increasingly data-driven, researchers at the University of Notre Dame need to harness modern approaches such as computational simulation.

To adequately support a range of important research projects with infrastructure and support services, Notre Dame’s Center for Research Computing (CRC) built a new high-performance computing (HPC) environment based on NeXtScale System technology – delivering results at the speed researchers need to meet their deadlines.

With the NeXtScale System cluster in place, the CRC is able to support exciting new research projects in a wide variety of fields, including atmospheric and oceanic analysis. “The NeXtScale System gives us the platform we need to keep up with ever-growing data demands,” explains Dr. Jarek Nabrzyski, Director of the Center for Research Computing at the University of Notre Dame. “It’s very reliable – with the HPC environment it gives results on time, every time.”

For more information, read the University of Notre Dame Center for Research Computing case study.

Most of the things we use in our life are connected, and those things usually get better when we combine them with other things whether it is food, clothes or apps! The same is true for data center technology where no one technology alone can solve a customer problem. Technologies have to work together to deliver business value. The System x X6 scalable servers from Lenovo and the new VMware vSphere 6.0 are two technologies that are a perfect complement to advance and lower the cost for demanding enterprise applications.

Launched in 2014, System x X6 servers deliver high levels of enterprise computing to transform how traditional enterprise applications are deployed. With high reliability, leadership performance and scalability up to 12TB of memory, X6 was a step function change in capability to host new and legacy workloads such as OLTP databases and ERP applications.

For many customers, however, the gate to deploying core business applications on x86 technology was the need for a scalable virtualization platform that could support the larger application image size. Solving this been a core requirement as described in this IDC video on virtualization.

The enterprise IT world has shifted again with the launch of VMware’s new vSphere 6.0. vSphere 6.0 is the virtualization platform that customers have been waiting for to revolutionize the way they deploy large enterprise workloads. vSphere 6.0 has a range of new capabilities that when combined with System x X6 hardware from Lenovo will change how enterprise workloads are deployed and managed.

X6 and vSphere 6.0, together change the game for enterprise applications

The new vSphere ESXi 6.0 supports at the system level up to 480 logical CPUs (cores/threads in a system) and up to 12TB of system RAM, so it can now take full advantage of the unique scale-up design of Lenovo X6 servers.

In addition, ESXi 6.0’s new virtual machine support for 128 virtual CPUs and 4TB of RAM delivers the ability to virtualize large workload images that were previously not possible on a virtualized x86 servers. Now on one server you can virtualize multiple application images of up to 4TB each.

What does this mean for enterprise customers? Before vSphere 6.0 customers could deploy large single images on X6 without virtualization to get great performance but with limited flexibility or application management. NOW customers can virtualize multiple demanding, multi-terabyte workloads, such as database, analytics and ERP, on clusters of X6. This allows administrators to manage and actively migrate workloads to achieve outstanding performance, and increased uptime and manageability. For example if an X6 system needs updating the application or database can be migrated to another X6 in the cluster to update the primary system with no application downtime.

Lenovo has worked closely with VMware to deliver the ability to virtualize enterprise class workloads. X6 and vSphere 6.0 go great together to deliver customers a new level of infrastructure efficiency while maximizing uptime.

For universities, staying at the forefront of academic research depends increasingly on providing scientists with access to powerful, flexible and energy-efficient supercomputing facilities. TU Darmstadt deployed a new supercomputing environment based on System x iDataPlex dx360 M4 servers from Lenovo as their compute platform.

This solution offers 38 times the performance of their previous supercomputer, and allows administrators to cut time spent on routine management. High energy efficiency reduces total cost of ownership. This state-of-the-art system will support TU Darmstadt’s research — which uses large and complex simulations — and pave the way for groundbreaking achievements for the university.

Simple, seamless and scalable server infrastructure for SAP HANA has enabled System x to have strong success with over 3,600 systems shipped to customers worldwide. One example of this success is Hapimag. Their challenge was to boost the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and capacity planning activities. They needed to accelerate the analysis of large sets of highly granular data on customers, sales and occupancy. Implementing SAP HANA on System x server infrastructure has enabled Hapimag to cut mailing costs by 75 percent and boost business results.

Applications such as SAP Business Warehouse (BW) on HANA and SAP Business Planning & Consolidation require a scale-out architecture to support large-memory requirements while SAP S4/HANA applications typically require a large-memory, scale-up architecture. Choosing server infrastructure that can seamlessly scale from single-server configurations to multi-server cluster configurations provides investment protection allowing you to deploy the same server platform in development, test and production environments for BW or S4/HANA applications enabling you to have a common server platform, software stack and server management policy across all of your SAP application environments.

Lenovo provides System x solution services to help install and manage your SAP HANA servers. Implementation with GPFS enables unique scalability from single node up to 56-node configurations along with unique features such as synchronous disaster recovery and encryption. Many customers, including Hapimag, have realized significant business benefit from their SAP HANA deployments. Lenovo, with its System x enterprise heritage and experience in installing and managing SAP HANA systems can help you speed your SAP HANA deployment and realize the business potential that new SAP HANA applications enable.

As one of the lead participants in the VMware Partner Exchange, which recently took place in San Francisco, Lenovo was able to demonstrate the new EMC VSPEX with Lenovo for Private Cloud and VDI offerings. Lenovo, VMware and EMC Business Partners could touch, feel and see a real value for the EMC VSPEX Channel Program, which now includes Flex System and ThinkServer systems from Lenovo.

Our joint business partners are excited and looking forward to building solutions for customers leveraging EMC VNX and XtremIO storage with Flex System. The EMC VSPEX Business Partner program now offers customers a greater choice of qualified, latest-technology infrastructure components with Lenovo ThinkServer and Flex System, and its integrated network offerings.

This is truly an amazing time for technology. The spark can be found on so many different planes — from the amazing achievement in space by a little robot rover named Curiosity, to the amazing, all-electric car, aka Tesla. For years, growing demand for storage capacity has stressed the storage administrator because no matter what had been planned, the need for storage always exceeded the forecast.

So what exactly is software-defined storage (SDS)? If we settle on IDC’s definition, it is the use of commodity storage devices for capacity and a software stack used entirely for the management and delivery of a full range or suite of storage services. What makes this new and exciting may not be quite apparent to anyone except the storage administrator. With the centralization of management systems within the hypervisor and operating system, a central, single pane of glass can control and manage the system and storage. New storage technologies and the benefits they bring are much simpler to assimilate within the data center in this new model.

The best example of the improvements in storage efficiency is demonstrated through the combination of System x and Flex System servers from Lenovo with VMware Virtual SAN storage. In fact, System x-based Ready Nodes have now become ready-to-go SDS building blocks for IT data centers. While SDS simplifies storage overall, it still depends on hardware.

Let’s look at the below three aspects of SDS and see if they are myth or fact.

SDS reduces cost

JBOD (Just a bunch of disks) is SDS

SDS does not scale

SDS reduces cost – FACT. SDS does reduce cost. There may be a question as to where the cost benefit comes from, but when you look at the challenges faced for storage administrators, simplified management and lower-cost hardware typically feature among the top. Both of these are the strong suite of SDS. New challenges are also emerging in security, data retention and reliability. The ability to respond to many of these needs via sophisticated software is often the preferred path and can be done efficiently and with automation. The advances in processor and server technologies have moved the center of intelligence away from lower-level controllers and adapters into more stable regions of the server, centralizing costs and removing redundancies. With faster networks, commodity storage, and larger-capacity servers, a balanced growth path can be defined. An example is the Virtual SAN technology provided by VMware on System x. VSAN forms the first tier to an SDS implementation, and because it manages storage across servers, it can improve reliability and provide high-availability features. Faced with these challenges, SDS can reduce up-front capital cost and ongoing, longer-term operational costs.

JBOD is SDS – MYTH. JBOD depends on software just like SDS does; but it is more dependent on hardware. It can be quite an effective way to use storage capacity on a server, but the reality is that SDS provides significantly more features employing the performance improvements in the latest processor technology. So, the more effective use of spare-disk capacity on the server may be best from an SDS implementation. However, JBOD can be quite effective. Lenovo announced an Exchange solution using JBOD on the System x3650 M5 servers. This video highlights some of the capabilities. Similar to VSAN, JBOD can be an effective storage tier in an SDS implementation, but it is not SDS by itself.

SDS does not scale – MYTH. The need for specific storage capacity has become almost unpredictable because of exponential growth seen in data centers. Government regulation, device veracity and sheer volume of images, videos and messaging are among the many reasons for the growth. The need to be agile in the ability to scale is a key storage challenge. The question of scalability is addressed in a white paper I wrote called Simplifying Storage Scalability with VMware Virtual SAN on System x Servers. The ability to scale out and scale up storage within a server, and by the addition of servers, provides a balanced approach to scaling. This is especially true when the server selection is made judiciously. The System x3650 M5 platform supports as many as twenty-six 2.5-inch drive bays; implementing SDS with a strategic platform such as this makes SDS a perfect path to scalability.

Swiss-based Managed Service Provider ITpoint provides IT infrastructure solutions to a wide range of cross-industry businesses of all sizes.Customers offload their IT problems and expect outstanding platform stability and security. To provide dependable cloud services for its customers, ITpoint chose System x 3650 servers for their high availability and security. Below is an excerpt from the case study, but be sure to read it in full.

With the new infrastructure, ITpoint can act as a client’s full IT department, or as a replication site for clients who want to keep their IT in house but prefer to replicate to their data centers to facilitate business continuity. The System x servers are located in two separate data centers to offer secure redundancy.

Remo Fleischli, Sales Manager at ITpoint, stated, “Thanks to its System x infrastructure, ITpoint can provide its clients with the high performance of a reliable and secure IT environment with a centralized access point for added convenience. And, in addition to benefiting from higher availability, ITpoint clients are also experiencing lower costs. We believe that our clients save 50 percent in IT costs.”

By taking advantage of the availability and disaster-recovery benefits of the ITpoint data centers, customers can save the cost of an IT employee, get more value from their technology budget. and focus their staff on more strategic activities.

Your personal data, that is. If you’re like the majority of people surveyed by McAfee®, you’re probably sharing a lot of personal and intimate information with a significant other.

While that might seem harmless, sharing private passwords and deeply personal content can set the stage for a nightmare of a play—one that exposes suggestive texts meant for your sweetheart to grandma or leaves your digital “doors” wide open for cybercriminals.

Nearly 70 percent of people polled by McAfee said they fear having personal information leaked or shared without their permission. Yet more than half of the same survey sample rarely deletes intimate photos and videos after sending them to intended recipients.

And those dicey visuals aren’t all our loved ones have access to: 56 percent of people share their Facebook passwords with significant others, and more than 40 percent provide access to private email, mobile devices and PCs.

Scorned lovers have never had it so easy, to say the least. But it’s not just souring relationships that can put shared data in the wrong hands.

Even if you do feel genuinely safe enough to place 100 percent trust in a partner, there are plenty of other threats lurking about. Something as simple as recycling a handful of passwords for your family’s every device and account is enough to set up your loved ones for identity theft. Even scarier is the personal PC that wasn’t completely cleared of files before being handed down to a now-bitter coworker or family member.

So before all becomes fair game in love and cybercrime, make that date with your data. Here are a few suggestions on how to best spend it:

Pick newer, stronger passwords for all your accounts and be seriously selective about who gets access. (Want to make your sweetie swoon? Give the gift of a password manager.)

Purge your devices and cloud storage accounts of any and all files you never want made public, and be sure to wipe your old PC clean each time you get a new one.

Lenovo Companion | Your Go-To App

Read more content like this in the Lenovo Companionapp, which is preloaded on all Windows 8 and 8.1 Lenovo and Think systems.You can find it on your system in the Lenovo Apps section on the Windows Start Screen.

Lenovo Companion is filled with exclusive content to help you learn about your new Lenovo or Think system. You'll find quick-reference “how to” articles on everything from getting to know the preloaded apps on your system to how to use your new trackpad. And, in select countries, you'll be able to stay up-to-date on technology news with articles and blogs from trusted sources, partners and Lenovo Insider bloggers.

Be sure to note...the new version of Lenovo Companion is only available on Windows 8.1. So, if you’re running Windows 8 or an older version of Windows, now is the time to upgrade.

We made quite the splash with the introduction of the ThinkPad Stack at CES back in January. It’s always rewarding to see such a positive reaction to the work we do. The ThinkPad Stack is a clever modular solution for organizing various mobile accessories for your ThinkPad. Using a system of interlocking connectors and magnets, the highly portable accessories pass power and data through the stack without clumsy cables. The last things we need are more computer cables in our lives.

Aside from the usual technical challenges that designers wrestle with, we also needed to create a compelling design solution that was attractive and easy to use. My team did an exhaustive study of alternative forms, interlocking concepts, form factors, connector locations, and magnetic forces required to lock modules together. If we specified too little force they could unexpectedly separate, but if we went too strong, it could be a real frustration trying to pry them apart. Much of design is about making the right tradeoffs.

Some of the sketches and study models we built to develop the final design

Architecturally, the concept of stacking modules reminded me of my home stereo components. Scale aside, the design problem is very similar. Discipline, order and vertical alignment between components are important themes to consider in such a system design. After the design was finished, I couldn’t help but notice the striking similarity of the ThinkPad Stack to the austere Braun Atelier stereo system. Designed by Dieter Rams in the early 1980’s, it is still one of my favorite stereo designs. I came very close to buying one when I lived in Kansas. It’s a true design classic.

G.I. John and “Dieter” strike an artsy pose beside the ThinkPad Stack

I couldn’t resist celebrating the comparison in an entertaining way. In my photo parody I added an original Braun Atelier brochure, a mocked up cylindrical stand, wooden bendy “Dieter Rams” mannequin, and a John Swansey “Action Figure”. Around the studio it’s usually referred to as G.I. John. I art directed the creation of the action figure to commemorate John’s 30th service anniversary with IBM/Lenovo. I’ve heard through reliable sources that John keeps it in a glass bell jar on his fireplace mantel. You can’t be too careful with such treasures.

The final ThinkPad Stack consists of 4 unique modules that can be mixed and matched according to people's needs. The current Stack modules are: Dual Port USB Power Bank, Bluetooth Speaker, WiFi Access Point, and a 1TB hard disk drive. I think the design turned out great and the product concept really makes sense for those who carry a ThinkPad. I would love to get feedback on any other modules we should consider developing. We might already be working on some :)

When I spoke with Camillo Sassano, senior industrial designer, about the idea of a podcast about the design of X6, I asked him if I could record the initial conversation with my cell phone. “Of course,” he replied. Phone retrieved from my purse, I reached in for my makeshift phone holder -- a recycled cup from my last out-of-the-office-fast-food-lunch. I positioned it upside down on the table. The cup sported a crudely-cut rectangular hole in the bottom large enough to snugly grip my cell phone and hold it upright. The fast food chain name was cleverly disguised with an A-line “skirt” made of yellow scrap paper.

We agreed that the impromptu phone holder was functional, straightforward to use, and it afforded me, the user, the ability to do something that was not easy to do before – record interviews without actually having to hold the mobile phone with one hand. My sad recycled “plasti-holder” actually served as a great segue to the podcast’s intended topic -- how product design intersects with the human experience. Listen to the six minute podcast that ultimately resulted from our conversations that day. Camillo talks about strategy, the X6 bookshelf design and how the human experience impacts designing an enterprise server.

Flex System offers high-performance Ethernet and converged networking switches and adapters that can fit into your existing network and future IT environment. These highly flexible products coupled with on-demand scalability offer an easy way to scale as your IT requirements grow. The portfolio includes switches and adapters from Emulex, Broadcom, Mellanox and Lenovo. Lenovo offers an array of networking communication technologies ranging from Ethernet to Fibre Channel to InfiniBand to iSCSI.

Today, we are witnessing explosive growth of data communication facilitated by expansion and proliferation of Internet access across the globe. Considering this gigantic requirement, the natural question that comes to mind is, “What is the common technology feature that supports such unprecedented growth of data?“ The most common answer is Ethernet. Emulex is helping to show why Ethernet is quickly becoming the faster-growing data communication device. In this blog, I will discuss how two new features from Emulex’s new Virtual Fabric Adapter 5 (VFA5) chipset are facilitating this trend.

The Emulex VFA5 Network Adapter Family builds on the foundation of previous generations of Emulex VFAs by delivering performance enhancements and new features that reduce complexity and cost while improving performance. The Emulex VFA5 supports Virtual Fabric (vNIC1), switch independent (vNIC2) and Unified Fabric Port (UFP) modes that enable multiple functions per port. Each physical port can be logically configured to emulate up to four virtual network interface cards (vNIC) functions with user-definable bandwidth settings. Additionally, each physical port can simultaneously support a storage protocol (FCoE or iSCSI).

RMDA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) is a networking protocol and standard that directly addresses two key limitations of current compute and networking architectures, namely overhead created by data copies between user (application) and kernel memories and latencies introduced by the TCP/IP protocol. RDMA is fundamentally an accelerated I/O delivery mechanism. It introduces the concept of “zero-copy” data placement, which allows specially designed RDMA NICs on both ends of a transaction (also called an R-NIC) to transfer data directly from the user memory of the source server to the user memory of the destination server bypassing the operating system (OS) kernel.

Bypassing the kernel lets applications issue commands to the NIC without having to execute a kernel call. The RDMA request is issued from user space to the source (local) R-NIC and over the Ethernet network to the destination (remote) R-NIC without requiring any kernel involvement. This reduces the number of context switches between kernel space and user space, while handling network traffic. Because the RDMA data transfer is performed by the DMA engine on the R-NIC, the CPU is not used for the memory movement, freeing it to perform other tasks, such as hosting more virtual workloads.

Emulex Virtual Network Exceleration (VNeX) offloads can deliver enhanced performance in cloud architected environments that utilize overlay networking protocols such as VXLAN (supported by VMware) and NVGRE (supported by Microsoft). With these technologies from the two leading virtualization providers, customers can benefit with true virtual machine agility across the data center. Historically, when moving one VM from one physical host to another, the network administrator would have to come and physically configure the new switch port that the VM, was connecting to through the host. Virtual Network Exceleration (VNeX) technology built in to the VFA5 allows the overlay networking protocol processing to be offloaded to the VFA5 adapter rather than stealing cycles from the server CPU, meaning customers can achieve greater VM density and optimum CPU utilization simply by choosing VFA5 for virtualized environments.

Reliable, efficient, flexible IT infrastructure makes a difference, regardless of industry. Italian metal shelving manufacturer CAEM-Magrini decided to shelve its old infrastructure for efficient, easy-to-manage System x servers.Below is a short excerpt from the case study, but be sure to check it out in full.

The flexibility and cost effectiveness of a virtual environment appealed to the company, which also wanted an infrastructure that would be easy to upgrade during its five-year plan for growth. Francesco Bartolomei, IT administrator at CAEM, stated, “We strive to produce A-level products, and to do that, we need the best possible solutions to simplify our jobs. We went with System x because they, too, are A-level products… The System x system was the best choice for the quality-to-price ratio.”

With the new infrastructure, CAEM has benefitted from outstanding uptime. The high-availability system enables staff to perform upgrades and maintenance without impacting productivity — and managing the virtualized system is significantly simpler than before.

Yesterday, on my way to college, I forgot to zip my bag up. While unsuspectingly walking along the road, I suddenly heard an ear-shattering clonk behind me. I turned around and spotted my ThinkPad Yoga sitting there on the pavement. I might have uttered a swear word or two. Anyway, I needed to get to college and could only inspect the damage during my break.

I had concluded that it fell about 1.5m and actually hit the asphalt sideways with one of its corners. This is the worst possible thing that could happen, because the entire force of the impact is concentrated on one area, instead of being spread out evenly across the chassis.

Thus, all the more surprised I was that it had actually survived this drop with minimal damage! In fact, the worst that happened is that a small piece of the corner of the lid had broken off, and the paint was missing on the other side, along with 2 or 3 small scratches on the chassis.

I must say, the ThinkPad Yoga really impressed me that day. I always suspected it to be very rugged, due to the way its built (magnesium-alloy, like the original X1). I have already ordered a new lid (the silver version). It will be as good as new again after I replace the lid.

The ThinkPad Yoga is without a doubt one of the finest ThinkPads I have ever owned.

Interested in a self-forming and self-healing Ethernet network? It’s available today from Lenovo. Flex System offers high-performance Ethernet and converged networking switches and adapters that can fit into your existing network and future IT environment. These highly flexible products coupled with on-demand scalability offer an easy way to scale as your IT requirements grow. The portfolio includes switches and adapters from Brocade, QLogic, Emulex, Broadcom, Mellanox and Lenovo. Lenovo offers an array of networking communication technologies including Ethernet, Ethernet Fabrics, Fiber Channel (FC) and InfiniBand.

Brocade VCS fabric automation and zero-touch virtualization support ensure that the network is automatically aware of all devices (servers, switches, appliances) within its virtualized server domain and provide a very simple, non-decriptive network scalability as organizations add and remove switches and servers, both physical and virtual, to the fabric without any manual configuration or network administration involvement. Another benefit of the Brocade VCS fabrics is a feature called Logical Chassis that logically centralizes the VCS network management where all the switches within the fabric appear as a single “logical” switch to the administration and to the rest of the network devices. Logical Chassis significantly reduces complexity in the management layer, which in turn simplifies on-going maintenance and troubleshooting.

An example of how Brocade VCS fabrics are self-forming, self-healing, and highly resilient is the “zero-touch” creation of inter-switch link (ISL) trunking in the fabric, which provides multiple active-active connections within the network and eliminates the need for the less-efficient Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) links. Simply connect two or more links between switches in the fabric and ISL trunk groups are automatically formed without any manual configuration. This auto-trunking capability doubles the utilization of the entire network while improving resilience. The Brocade ISL Trunks also provide rapid link failover and fabric re-convergence, allowing additional trunk links to be added or modified quickly and non-disruptively providing elastic bandwidth growth without requiring downtime or service window.

Here's an example of how VCS fabrics are built for virtualization. When new VMs are created, the fabric automatically discovers the VM and propagates its networking requirements, such as QoS policies, to all switches in the fabric. Then, when the VM moves, there is no network reconfiguration required. Adding new switches is also simple requiring as few as three configuration commands, connecting the switch to the fabric and the switch automatically learns the rest of what it needs to know from the fabric and from the VM management software. All these features result in customers deploying network capacity up to five times faster with VCS Fabrics than their legacy LAN architectures or even competing Ethernet fabric technologies.

Finally, VCS fabrics can be easily introduced into their existing LAN and SAN environments, connecting to customer’s existing networks with standard Ethernet protocols and therefore protecting those investments. No forklift upgrades are required. Additionally, with the VCS Fabric Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Flex port capabilities, customers can converge the adapters within their server, connect the VCS fabric and then split-out storage traffic to the FC SAN at 4, 8 or 16Gbps, and the non-storage traffic to the Ethernet network at 1 or 10Gbps. This converged design reduces the number of adapters in the servers and simplifies cabling in the rack.

The Brocade VDX family of switches span from embedded to top-of-rack (ToR) switches to the larger Modular Chassis Platform, providing customers VCS fabrics from 24 to over 8400+ ports in a linear, scalable way. The hardware is designed with elastic network changes in mind for rapid scalability, and with flexibility to seamlessly connect existing network while preparing them to respond to fast-changing business needs.

Flex System EN4023 10Gb Scalable Switch

We will be running a promotion on the Flex System EN4023 10Gb Scalable Switch starting March 1. When you purchase the EN4023, you get the FCOE/FC Flexport License at a significant discount. The price will be set according to your geography, but the cost should be minimal.

System x X6 servers from Lenovo are made for analytics. Sporting superior I/O performance, three times more memory than previous generations, and seamless scalability, these systems – and their predecessors based on Enterprise X-Architecture® (EXA) -- already have an impressive history of benchmark wins, many of them with STAC1. Now a new STAC Report™ proves that X6 is “right on the money” for the financial industry.

The report, posted on January 21, 2015 by the Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC®), pitted the X6 against the baseline STAC-M3 Benchmark suite using the kdb+ database from Kx Systems. Compared to other systems using kdb+, the x3850 X62 chalked up the fastest scores in seven response-time benchmarks; proved 27%-97% faster than the next best performance in the month-, quarter-, and year-high-bid benchmarks;3 and recorded 86% faster times than the next best performance in the market snapshot benchmark.4

The key metric in STAC-M3 is query response time. In particular STAC benchmarks test high-speed analytics on time-series data -- tick-by-tick market data, or "tick database" stacks. Technology innovations bring better processing speeds and associated reductions in the cost of processing. Among innovations that might impact benchmarks are new kinds of non-volatile memory (e.g., flash), new integration methods into the stack, software, new processors, memory, and server architectures; advanced file systems; and more scalable storage systems. STAC-M3 involves stringent testing of all of these factors.

X6 servers aren’t new to awards and accolades. These systems have already gained industry buzz in analytics by a winning a TPC-H business intelligence benchmark. X6 systems also have achieved recognition in the SAP arena by winning two SAP S&D Two Tier benchmarks, hosting the largest SAP HANA system in the world at 100 TB and garnering an impressive 64% market share in SAP HANA systems shipped.

Add the seven new STAC response-time winning benchmarks to the others that the X6 family of rack servers has achieved since its January 2014 launch and the list of wins for this generation of System x EXA server climbs to fourteen.

STAC-M3 benchmarks are governed by user firms in the STAC Benchmark Council. The Council is comprised of more than 250 financial institutions and other “algorithmic enterprises,” as well as 50 vendor organizations. Lenovo has just been granted membership in the Council. This group develops benchmark standards under the direction of user firms such as large global banks, brokerage houses, exchanges, hedge funds, proprietary trading shops, and other market participants. Benchmarks are conducted in challenging areas such as time-series analytics, risk simulations, and processing of very high-speed data. STAC uses these community source standards to provide technology research and testing tools to members of the Council, as well as to make reports such as the latest STAC Report on the x3850 X6 publicly available.

To learn more about X6 solutions for the financial industry and for “algorithmic enterprises,” contact your Lenovo Sales Representative.

5IMPORTANT NOTE: Most prior configurations tested against STAC-M3 have used RAID 5, since this was the original request of the STAC-M3 Working Group. However, with growing interest in flash and tiered storage, STAC consulted the working group on the philosophy toward RAID in the case of direct-attached SSD storage. The consensus was that SSD configurations with no RAID can be quite relevant to enterprise tick databases. Premium STAC subscribers: See the discussion on this on the STAC-M3 forum at www.STACresearch.com/discussion/2014/09/25/raid-or-not-raid.

Intel and STAC studied the effect of using no RAID or RAID 0 with this SSD-based system, as well as varying other storage-related configuration settings. There were significant effects (up to 2.5x). Premium STAC subscribers: Read the analysis in the STAC Vault at www.STACresearch.com/KDB141211.

About the Author

As a member of the seasoned product marketing team that launched the System x X6 family of servers, Kathy Holoman has a rich history in technology marketing. Prior to joining the Lenovo Enterprise Product Group, Kathy held high-impact global technology marketing roles in four Fortune 100 companies (IBM, HP, EDS, GE) and one Global 500 organization, Schneider Electric. Her mission in life has always been to accelerate the sales process by helping sellers to articulate -- and buyers to understand -- solution positioning, value propositions and competitive differentiators. She translates technology attributes into tangible business value. Kathy’s ability to “tell the story” across a variety of marketing media and a span of several languages has been recognized not only with corporate awards such as the IBM Global Leadership Award, but also with Addy Awards for advertising, two international global events marketing best of show awards, and a top-three graphic design award in a field of more than 17,000. Read more on Linkedin or follow @techiewahoo on Twitter.

Here’s a common scenario: You’re in a hurry to go from one place to another. You leave your laptop turned on, with the display open, and grab the corner and start walking. The next thing you know, it slips and falls out of your hands to the floor. Now you’re stuck with a broken laptop and wishing you had purchased Lenovo’s Accidental Damage Protection (ADP).

Sound familiar? You’re not alone and we see this all the time. While Lenovo PCs are durable, they still need to be handled with care.

Here are some tips on how to carry your laptop when moving from place-to-place.

How to Carry Your Laptop

The beauty of laptops, especially the more recent convertible and 2-in-1 notebooks, is that they are incredibly versatile. Whether you’re going from meeting-to-meeting or just moving to a different room in your home, here are our suggestions on how to carry your laptop safely:

Purchase Accidental Damage Protection. This is important! ADP is available as an upgrade at the time you purchased your PC or within the 90 days after your purchase your new PC. Read more about what is covered by ADP.

Shut down. There are three ways to do this: power the PC off completely, hibernate or put it to sleep. Learn more about each mode here.

Unplug external devices. Carry all items that plug into your laptop separately, including USB keys and the AC adapter.

Close the laptop lid. Press down on the middle of the exterior of the lid. Push down slowly. Even if you’re in a hurry, make sure not to slam it shut or you could damage the display.

Hold your laptop securely and carefully. Be sure to hold it in a safe manner, so it won’t drop or slip easily.

Tip: Do not pick up your laptop by the screen or corner! This puts undue pressure on the hinges that attach the screen to the base. Plus, it’s easy for the laptop to slip out of your hands in this position.

How to Travel with Your Laptop

If you’re traveling with your laptop–whether in a car, train or airplane–here are some tips what you can do to keep your laptop safe:

Shut down completely. Laptops can overheat if left on while in a travel bag or carrying case.

Unplug external devices. Remove all devices that plug into your laptop and place them in separate compartment so they don’t accidentally crack the exterior of your laptop.

Carry your laptop in a protective case. There are several options to consider when selecting a carrying case. Lenovo offers a multitude of styles to meet your travel needs including backpacks, messenger bags, sleeves and carrying cases. Make sure that the case you select fits snugly around all sides of the laptop so it won’t slip or move around. Tip: You can buy carrying cases and accessories directly in Lenovo Companion. Just click on the Accessories icon in the “My System” section.

Avoid exposing your laptop to extreme temperatures. While a protective case can protect your laptop from bumps, it won’t protect it from extreme temperatures. Avoid leaving your laptop in a bag in spaces that can get extremely hot or cold, such as cars

Avoid moisture and damp environments. This is an obvious one, but it’s important to remember.

Tip: When flying, carry on your laptop bag. Be sure not to check it with your luggage. Once on board, place the laptop bag under the seat in front of you. Laptops placed in overhead storage areas can get bumped or damaged.

And here are some other general tips to keep in mind when traveling with your PC:

Back-up your data. Make sure to back-up your data on a regular basis, especially before and during travel. Keep the back-up and your laptop in separate places or in the cloud. We recommend using Lenovo REACHit.

Protect your PC with internet security software. We’ve written several times about the importance of PC security. We can’t emphasize this enough!

Be wary of WiFi. Only connect to networks you trust. And, to be more secure, connect using WWAN or through your smartphone hotspot.

Lenovo Companion | Your Go-To App

Read more content like this in the Lenovo Companionapp, which is preloaded on all Windows 8 and 8.1 Lenovo and Think systems.You can find it on your system in the Lenovo Apps section on the Windows Start Screen.

Lenovo Companion is filled with exclusive content to help you learn about your new Lenovo or Think system. You'll find quick-reference “how to” articles on everything from getting to know the preloaded apps on your system to how to use your new trackpad. And, in select countries, you'll be able to stay up-to-date on technology news with articles and blogs from trusted sources, partners and Lenovo Insider bloggers.

Be sure to note...the new version of Lenovo Companion is only available on Windows 8.1. So, if you’re running Windows 8 or an older version of Windows, now is the time to upgrade.

]]>2015-02-04T16:38:00+00:00http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/ryan-higa-no-pain-no-gain-yoga-3-pro
http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/ryan-higa-no-pain-no-gain-yoga-3-pro#When:05:25:00ZWith its beautiful design and watchband-inspired hinge, Yoga 3 Pro has certainly become an object of desire. We didn’t know quite how much that’s true until we saw Ryan Higa, Miranda Sings and their friends play off for one of the innovative laptops in an uncompromising game entitled “I DARE YOU”. It’s not for the fainthearted but at least the winner was all smiles!

Caris Life Sciences is a leading biosciences company fulfilling the promise of precision medicine through quality and innovation. The company analyzes molecular data from a patient’s tumor with biomarker/drug associations to provide clinically actionable information to help doctors personalize treatment for cancer patients.

Caris next-generation sequencing (NGS) processes are fully supported by supercomputing technologies, including processing by NeXtScale System servers. For Caris, powerful analytics enables faster insight as they study the genomic alterations that may be driving a cancer — and as they identify therapeutic strategies that enable oncologists to improve treatment. Caris Vice President of Research and Development, Dr. David Spetzler, says, “Time is of the essence for us. We’re fighting a deadly disease and we don’t have time to waste.”

For the full story on how NeXtScale System M4 and M5 solutions helps Caris with analytics, read the Caris Life Sciences case study or watch the video.

For more information on NeXtScale, reach out to one of the Lenovo contacts below.

Prof. Dr. med. Katrin Amunts has been working on a project called The BigBrain at Jülich Supercomputing Centre. The study aims to create the first ultra-high resolution 3D model of the human brain to redefine traditional neuroanatomy maps and support advancements in neurosurgery.

Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) is part of the publicly funded Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH — the largest research center in Germany. JSC supports research into a wide range of fields including fundamental physics, life sciences, climate change and energy by providing the powerful infrastructure and technical expertise needed to run large and complex simulations quickly and effectively.

For the storage infrastructure on their BigBrain project, the center deployed an innovative System x GPFS Storage Server solution, which provides 7 petabytes of usable storage capacity, I/O bandwidth of up to 200 Gb/s and unique GPFS Native RAID capabilities.

JSC had to put major effort into managing its previous storage infrastructure efficiently. All the external storage controllers required management by the technical team, increasing costs and adding complexity. GPFS Storage Server manages all JSC's hardware components from a central location. Lothar Wollschläger, Storage Specialist at Jülich Supercomputing Centre says, “In our previous conventional RAID storage array, it took around 12 hours to rebuild just a 1 TB disk. Our new System x GPFS Storage Server solution enables us to rebuild to a non-critical state in just under one hour, ensuring consistent, high-speed access to large volumes of data for our simulations.”

Lenovo’s #DesignWithUs Challenge is your chance to design the next YOGA, showcase your creation to the world, and shape the future of Lenovo technology.

From FEB 1-28, tell us about what the next-gen YOGA should be, then seize the day and design it. Be sure to submit a description of your next-gen YOGA idea with photos, drawings, graphics or video to support.

Top ideas will be selected and showcased on our global social media handles. Among the best ideas, five will be selected for real consideration by our Lenovo YOGA designers, and will win their creator a big YOGA surprise!

My name is Johnson Li, Executive Director, Lenovo PC Design & User Experience, and I’d like to welcome you to the Lenovo Design Studio.

We call it D. Studio.

This is a space dedicated solely to the passion of product design. This community will comprise of my friends in the design industry, art and design media, students from around the world, and people who share our vision for good design.

I’m very excited about this community because it’s an opportunity for me and my team to share our real views of what design is all about. That said, we are not going to try and sell you a product. Instead, we hope to inspire you with our vision about design and its key role in the evolution of technology.

Please join us. Enjoy the dynamic images of what our inspirations have been. Get a sneak peek into future technologies that we’re considering. But, most importantly, we hope that you, designers around the world, will get involved and tell us what you think.

When I took over the design responsibility for ThinkPad, nearly 20 years ago, I was both honored and intimidated. Honored because it was likely the most successful design in the history of IBM, and intimidated for the same reason. My first impression of ThinkPad and its Richard Sapper design was one of total respect. It’s difficult to not respect any of the objects Richard has created over the last 60 years. Finally IBM had created a computer design that was more than a corporate formula for homogeneous similarity. Historically IBM had created some watershed designs, but during the late 80’s they seemed to be more about aesthetic neutrality to achieve a family relationship than great design. Much of their design reminded me of non-offensive beige carpet selected by a realtor to help sell a house quickly. I was personally more interested in designing to achieve a dramatic and modernist impression of timeless quality. On the day of its announcement, ThinkPad had what I aspired to create. Sapper's bento box inspired design was brilliant. Now I needed to develop a creative plan to ensure that nobody ruined it.

The bento design connection is still there 100 million ThinkPads later

I quickly determined that IBM didn’t need to constantly be reinventing the design of ThinkPad. Change for the sake of change seemed so superficial to me. On the contrary, Sapper and I had the idea to continuously refine it. Perhaps a radical hypothesis if you’re a marketing manager always trying to sell something new, but to us it made sense. After all, it’s the same thing Porsche had been doing with the iconic 911 for decades. This approach created enormous brand equity for the 911 and a huge cult following for the car. I wanted to do the same thing for ThinkPad. Adopting a philosophy of evolutionary refinement in an environment of rapidly changing high technology was to some preposterous, but we’ve proved over and over again that it works.

I’ll take a nice all black one with a bright red shifter knob

100 million ThinkPad’s later, it has become an icon of the computing industry. It’s the gold standard of quality and purposeful design by which all others are measured. Maybe I should start referring to it as the “black standard”? No other computer company has adopted such a radical evolution philosophy or tried to copy its unique design essence. ThinkPad is an authentic original that has become far more than a brand name. The design of ThinkPad and the brand are synonymous. Does anyone remember what our competitor’s laptops looked like 20 years ago, and do they even care? I don’t think so.

“Eve”, the nick name given the official 100 millionth ThinkPad, is the current epitome of what it means to be a ThinkPad. It pays homage to the pedigree and points to the future. The X1 carbon, and all ThinkPad’s, continue to stand out in a market saturated with an unimaginative sameness. The simple black box, with the red TrackPoint cap, conceived so long ago by Sapper, is clearly a survivor. Here’s to another 100 million ThinkPads!

There's nothing more satisfying then a bowl of steaming-hot chicken soup that’s been freshly homemade. One that's simmered with the finest ingredients from the free-range chicken — delicately cut into cubes — organic carrots and celery, homemade egg noodles, all seasoned to perfection and gently simmered until it is ready to be enjoyed.

Deploying a Lenovo converged infrastructure solution based on Flex System is just as satisfying, especially when you want all the finest components working together seamlessly and tuned to perfection. A Lenovo converged infrastructure solution based on Flex System allows you to order a complete, validated solution, which will ship to you fully integrated with servers, storage and networking, plus the tools to manage it all. The system has been fully optimized and arrives integrated and preconfigured and is ready to deploy into your network with your key workloads.

Imagine craving that chicken soup on a cold day, and all you have in front of you is a raw chicken, some unpeeled carrots and unwashed celery, no spices and no eggs for your noodles. Imagine that sinking feeling when you know nothing is going right and your meal is incomplete. Imagine that same feeling as you are faced with deploying a new IT Infrastructure and the myriad of choices you must make, let alone having to configure and order to get something that works together and is safe enough for your business-critical workloads. If you need to quickly deploy a converged infrastructure solution, do you want to be presented with a confusing list of part numbers to order and hundreds of boxes to unpack, integrate and configure? Or, even worse, is that some of the ingredients may be missing, like chicken soup without the chicken or noodles. It leaves you with that same, cold feeling. What you really want is the fresh, hot soup, not a pile of ingredients!

You can achieve that satisfying feeling of having a solution that can be ordered in minutes, built and delivered in days and deployed in hours with the knowledge that all the components have been expertly validated and configured in your system. Lenovo has taken the time to architect and validate the converged infrastructure configurations based on Flex System so that you know what you’re getting will meet your needs quickly, and have all the right ingredients to satisfy — just like that bowl of homemade chicken soup!

Thanks to Lori Campoli for helping me write this blog. Lori is an Executive Project manager in the Lenovo Enterprise Business group managing several projects, including Converged System Offerings for Flex Systems.

This is part of a weekly series featuring content written by the Lenovo Companion App Content Team

In a world where we’ve come to rely heavily on technology, few things are more frustrating than being held up by a slow computer. It can be downright maddening to sit and wait for your PC to boot, feeling powerless to push it into action faster.

There are plenty of ways you can help speed up your PC. You can free up disk space, regularly apply system updates and, a personal favorite, be on the lookout for zombies.

Another step that’s often overlooked is disabling all those pesky apps that run when Windows starts, even though you rarely use them. It’s probably not your fault that they run automatically. It’s all too easy to mindlessly check the “open at startup option” offered by many apps at installation.

Once you remove the auto-start setting you may be surprised at just how much your PC’s performance improves. Here are the steps to follow in Windows 8.1:

Start by Opening Task Manager

Pull up the search bar (swipe in from the right edge of the screen or direct your mouse pointer to the upper-right corner and then move it down) and enter Task Manager.

Go to the Startup tab, where you’ll see a list of apps that are set to run each time you turn on your PC. Next to each app you’ll also see the name of the publisher, status and estimated startup impact.

Then Disable Apps One by One

You can now right-click on any app to pull up and select Disable. The app will still appear on the list, but the status will change to “disabled.”

Yes, you’ll have to hand-select and disable programs one at a time, but this way you can pick and choose the ones you know for certain you don’t need at startup.

If you have a lot of apps installed and are especially frustrated with how long your PC takes to start up, grab a cup of coffee and settle in for a few minutes of disabling most, if not all, of them. (Which, after all, may be less time than you’d wait for the machine to boot in the first place.) You may want to first purge the apps you no longer need.

We’re all guilty of installing a cool-sounding new app, trying it out once or twice and then forever forgetting about it. It’s worth revisiting which programs are on your system and how many of them could be slowing it down.

Lenovo Companion | Your Go-To App

Read more content like this in the Lenovo Companionapp, which is preloaded on all Windows 8 and 8.1 Lenovo and Think systems.You can find it on your system in the Lenovo Apps section on the Windows Start Screen.

Lenovo Companion is filled with exclusive content to help you learn about your new Lenovo or Think system. You'll find quick-reference “how to” articles on everything from getting to know the preloaded apps on your system to how to use your new trackpad. And, in select countries, you'll be able to stay up-to-date on technology news with articles and blogs from trusted sources, partners and Lenovo Insider bloggers.

Be sure to note...the new version of Lenovo Companion is only available on Windows 8.1. So, if you’re running Windows 8 or an older version of Windows, now is the time to upgrade.

Effective October 1, IBM System x became part of the Lenovo Corporation. Moving forward, the ThinkServer brand and System x now comprise the Lenovo Enterprise Server Group. As we examined the overall marketplace opportunity for our new organization, the Cloud & Managed Service Provider /Hyperscale Public Internet segment was an area where we believed we could bring value.

Lenovo understands the unique challenges that face service providers today. With the advent of virtualization and the explosion of cloud, the demand for IT-as-a-service (data, platform, infrastructure, software, storage etc.) has never been higher. The increased demand presents a tremendous business opportunity for you, as a service provider, but it also makes your requirements for server performance and reliability even more critical.

Today, we are announcing our first program specifically designed for service providers, the Lenovo Service Provider Program. This program enables a streamlined channel engagement process, which offers advantages in the form of competitive prices, unique financing plans and the ability to choose infrastructure from a large and diverse product portfolio.

Our service provider partners will enjoy a community and a unique relationship that will deliver:

The ability to purchase competitively priced System x, Flex System, System x storage and networking products for your service provider datacenter directly from Lenovo distributors. Approved service providers will also be eligible to purchase ThinkServer products using Lenovo’s existing business partner programs. It’s Lenovo’s intent to consolidate this Service Provider Program for System x and the ThinkServer products by the first half of 2015.

Business development funds to support growth of your service provider business in the form of a backend rebate.

Access to special extended payment programs, if qualified, for up to 120 days payment deferral.

Access to consumption-based pricing, if qualified, in 1Q 2015.

A trade-in program for eligible products.

Testing vouchers for ongoing skills development.

Enterprise Solution Services at special rates for service providers.

Access to Express and FlexPac solutions (NA only).

(Note that these benefits may not be available in all countries and are subject to credit eligibility.)

The program officially launches in North America today. We are look forward to rolling this program out worldwide in the coming months!

Transferring Files with SHAREit vs. Your USB

Computers keep getting faster, our hard drives get bigger, and as a result our files are getting larger and larger every day. Today we struggle on how to send larger files - do we use the cloud, email, USB keys? The cloud can be a security risk and, just like email, has file size restrictions. USB keys are slow, easy to lose, and fill up with files quickly. But still, they’re one of the more popular ways to avoid the restrictions of the cloud and email.

So what can you do when a USB key just won’t meet your needs? Let’s see how SHAREit by Lenovo can save you the frustration of using a USB.

The Real Cost of a USB: Time

When you have files ranging from a few hundred megabytes to several gigabytes, a USB key can seem like an easy way to get them from your PC to another one. And when you’re travelling and want to get those same files on someone else’s PC, a USB is a reasonable choice. But the more you use a USB, the faster it fills up with files you have to dig through, and the more likely it is you’re going to lose it – and your files. Then there are the minutes you spend waiting for those files to transfer on and off of your PC.

All of that adds up to some serious time your USB is costing you.

SHAREit is a Smart and Convenient Alternative

SHAREit is simple: you can quickly transfer massive files from one PC to another, or even to your mobile device or tablet. Transfer speeds are up to 40 times faster than using a USB, and there’s no limit on file size. As long as SHAREit is installed and opened on both devices, you can quickly share photos, videos, music and file folders between them. And here’s the best part – you don’t even need to be connected to the internet to do it.

Sitting in a meeting with co-workers and need to send over a 500mb folder of design concepts? No problem.

Today Lenovo is announcing new, jointly developed solutions for EMC VSPEX, which feature EMC-validated Flex System and ThinkServer offerings from Lenovo combined with EMC storage solutions. The EMC VSPEX solution with Flex System and ThinkServer simplifies deployment of complex solutions such as cloud and VDI.

IT requires a responsive and agile infrastructure in response to demanding business requirements. The EMC VSPEX private cloud and VDI solutions with Flex System and ThinkServer reduce risk and accelerate deployment of a complete virtual infrastructure by providing guidance on the components that have been tested to be compatible, are proven to scale and deliver the performance your business requires. And, with the built-in networking capabilities and network architecture from Lenovo, you can dramatically reduce network complexity, simplify network management and increase overall data center operational efficiency.

What does this mean, really?

These EMC-validated solutions are really important to customers, partners, and of course, us at Lenovo. What EMC has effectively done with VSPEX is combine two powerful concepts — choice AND predictability. Organizations that are on a mission to transform their IT infrastructure want the flexibility to select the server, virtualization, storage, networking and backup components that work best for their specific needs, but also want to limit the risk and complexity in doing so.

VSPEX testing validates that the systems work together to solve specific business problems, providing the assurance (and comfort) of a pre-certified reference architecture. This is perfect for shortening time to value for customers, and great for partners who can now provide these solutions swiftly for their clients.

VSPEX Offerings with Lenovo

EMC offers VSPEX solutions built on the enterprise-class Flex System chassis and compute nodes, and ThinkServer systems, in combination with EMC storage solutions and EMC Powered backup. These reference architectures provide agile solutions that can be easily scaled and optimized for a variety of application workloads. Built with best-in-class Lenovo technologies and anchored by EMC VNX storage and EMC Powered backup, VSPEX enables faster deployment, more simplicity, greater choice, higher efficiency and lower risk.

Why ask ten questions when you can ask 11? I sat down with graffiti artist extraordinaire and INsider Juan Dimida at CES 2015 to talk tech, art and analog.

What was your first piece of tech?

My mom was a high school teacher in Philadelphia, when I was growing up. This was in the early 80s, and at that time, the schools were equipped with Apple 2Es. During the summer, she got to bring one home with her and we got to play on it. The screen was dark and everything showed up green - that's what I remember most about it. My sister, who’s 5 years older, actually got into programming on it, but I used it mainly to play games. I was kind of dyslexic as a kid, too, so my mom would make me type on the computer instead of write on paper, which helped train me to write properly, because the letters showed up the right way on screen, unlike when I would write them by hand.

What's a piece of tech you'd like to see make a comeback and why?

Hmm.. …that’s a tough question, b/c I’m so much in the head space of what’s “brand new” and what I can do with it, I almost forget about the old stuff. In the past year I’ve been getting into more video stuff. Nowadays everything is digital; HDMI, strings of #s... Earlier, things came through analog signals. I’d like to go back and use a VCR to process signals and make them do weird things, different than what you can do now with digital signals. There’s a different feel or sound to analog vs digital. It’s like talking about acoustic vs. electric.

Who's your favorite musician?

It switches from day to day. Right now I really like Juan Atkins.He's from Detroit, and I think he's considered the originator of techno. He innovated a lot of weird music with these sci-fi-like sounds. Ask me tomorrow, though, and my answer might change!

What's the most interesting thing you've discovered at CES?

The 3D TV screen. I'm talking about 3D TV that has images coming out of it - with no special 3D glasses needed. It's pretty crazy. Nuts!

What's your favorite spot in Philadelphia?

I like South Philly - the Italian Market. Philadelphia has such different neighborhoods with different feels. I grew up in the northern end in a neighborhood called Olney. It was fun growing up there, because it was a diverse neighborhood, and there was a lot of graffiti. So a lot of the kids were naturally into graffiti. That was our culture. That's what we did to create.

Finish this sentence: I'd sleep well knowing that ____________.

I'd sleep well knowing I didn't have anything important to do first thing in the morning!

Any New Year's resolutions?

I've got a few. First is, I want to make one original music track every week. It’s easy - if you compose electronic music - to get a song halfway done and then get another idea that doesn’t work with it and move on to the next song, and then you’ve got a ton of half-baked tracks. First resolution is to complete a song each week. Second is, to make more art. The studio where I work, we do public art. It’s a space in South Philly with a big garage. When the weather's nice and the garage doors are open, people will just wander in off the street, to see what we're up to. I want to do a painting every week that I can hang up in the garage so I have art to show when we have people stop in. Third resolution is to start working out again. A few years ago I was doing really well with this, but I need to get back into it. Like, maybe I need to start doing Just Dance again! My wife got me that a few years ago.

What's your favorite website for inspiration?

Youtube. All day long. If I get an idea and I don’t know how to do it, I go to Youtube. I get into weird electronic stuff from the 50s, 60s and 70s, and it's amazing what you can find on Youtube. Just pull up a playlist and go.

What's the best part of being a Lenovo INsider?

Learning about technology. I don’t know how computers work. By that I mean, I don’t know what’s going on “inside.” And that’s where this INsider community comes in handy. They know so much. If I have a question, like how you do something, or what part do I need to make this external music keyboard work, before I go out and buy the wrong cord or something, I ask an INsider. They always know. They’re like a tech board of advisors!

This is part of a weekly series featuring content written by the Lenovo Companion App Content Team

The lines separating work and play are blurrier than ever. We check up on Facebook friends while at work and edit work documents at home. This increases the risk of sharing your household finances spreadsheet at a big budget meeting or—heaven forbid—inviting the wrong Scott to your beer-brewing bash.

Here are five easy ways to organize your work and personal digital lives while using the same Lenovo system for both.

1. Customize Your Start Screen

When it comes to organizing, the Start screen is one of Windows 8.1’s greatest features. You can pin your most-used apps, move and resize tiles and create groups to separate the things you need for work from the apps you access for recreation.

Once you’ve pinned an app to the Start screen, simply press and hold it to resize or move it around. To move a group of tiles, first use two fingers to “pinch” the Start screen and zoom out. Then press or click and drag the group of tiles to where you want it positioned. When you’re done moving groups, tap or click anywhere on the screen to zoom back in.

2. Use Multiple Cloud Storage Accounts

If you’re like most Lenovo users, you probably have accounts with various services like Google Drive, Box and OneDrive. But are you making efficient use of your cloud storage?

One easy way to maximize these accounts is to dedicate each one to a separate purpose: Google Drive for collaborating on work documents, Dropbox for storing and sharing family photos and so on. With Lenovo REACHit, you can easily find and edit documents no matter where they are.

3. Create Separate Windows User Accounts

If you really need a technique to stay on task or clearly compartmentalize work and play, you can create separate Microsoft user accounts—one for work and another for your personal life.

To add a second account to your Windows 8.1 PC, go to Settings > Change PC Settings > Other accounts > Add an account. Once you’ve added a new user account, you can switch back and forth by clicking or tapping on your photo in the upper right-hand corner of the Start screen.

You can now customize a Start screen for each account. So when it’s time to edit an Excel spreadsheet for your boss, log in to your work account for quick access and a distraction-free environment. Then, when you’re relaxing on the couch, switch over to your personal account to pull up a recipe for dinner.

4. Sync Mail and Contacts Separately

Feeding all your email and contacts into one account is a convenience—until you’re in a hurry. Then it becomes surprisingly easy to send email to an unintended recipient. (Gmail auto-complete is notorious for this). One way to solve this problem is to use two separate email apps. You might choose to use the Windows Mail, Calendar and People app for work and a personal Google account for all other emails and contacts.

5. Use Different Browsers

Don’t want to create multiple user accounts? Another option is to use different browsers. For example, you could customize Internet Explorer bookmarks based on work needs and Chrome apps for personal hobbies. It’s not as comprehensive as other alternatives but can be handy once you get in the habit of “living” in a certain browser depending on the tasks at hand.

Looking for more ways to organize your digital life? You can always separate work and play on multiple PCs and learn how to control them remotely.

Lenovo Companion | Your Go-To App

Read more content like this in the Lenovo Companionapp, which is preloaded on all Windows 8 and 8.1 Lenovo and Think systems.You can find it on your system in the Lenovo Apps section on the Windows Start Screen.

Lenovo Companion is filled with exclusive content to help you learn about your new Lenovo or Think system. You'll find quick-reference “how to” articles on everything from getting to know the preloaded apps on your system to how to use your new trackpad. And, in select countries, you'll be able to stay up-to-date on technology news with articles and blogs from trusted sources, partners and Lenovo Insider bloggers.

Be sure to note...the new version of Lenovo Companion is only available on Windows 8.1. So, if you’re running Windows 8 or an older version of Windows, now is the time to upgrade.

The IT world is abuzz with talk of software-defined storage. The pendulum swing metaphor no longer applies. Instead, this ball is heading down a highway, providing the promise of linear scalability and taking the guesswork out of the art of storage capacity management. Welcome to the world of VMware virtualization. VMware has led the IT world in building software virtualization for compute servers. Now, as converged systems come into focus, VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) embodies the hyper-converged IT with scalable storage.

The best example of the improvements in storage efficiency is demonstrated through the combination of System x and Flex System servers from Lenovo with VMware VSAN. In fact, System x-based Ready Nodes have now become ready-to-go, software-defined storage building blocks for IT datacenters.

VSAN is a software-defined storage tier for VMware vSphere environments. VSAN clusters server disks and flash to create radically simple, high-performance, resilient, shared storage designed for virtual machines. Some of the benefits of VSAN include:

Lower TCO — Reduce TCO up to 50 percent by leveraging server-side HDDs and SSDs to create a converged and resilient “SAN-like” storage tier within the hypervisor.

Lower OpEx — Automation and more efficient management lowers operating expenses. vSphere integration ensures that current skillsets can be used to manage the technology. If you know vSphere, you know Virtual SAN.

Predictability — No large up-front investments. VSAN allows you to scale granularly and avoid overprovisioning and overpaying for future capacity and performance needs.

Virtual SAN is simple and automates time-consuming manual storage tasks. Not only is VSAN managed through VMware vSphere, but it also integrates with other VMware products. This integration makes provisioning and management of storage in virtual environments easy and seamless.

Virtual SAN, when combined with System x, provides a robust hyperconverged storage solution. Hyperconverged storage is a solution that combines storage, compute, networking and virtualization into a single unit. It has been receiving strong acceptance in the market because it provides IT with greater control over storage management in a virtual environment and there little configuration is required. And, in the case of the Lenovo and VMware solution, customers leverage the same management apparatus they’ve been using in their current virtual environments, vSphere.

Lenovo has announced VSAN-Ready Node configurations on System x – both on rack servers (System x3550 and x3650) as well as blade servers (Flex System x240), which provide ample storage to support balance and lower cost objectives. The goal is to easily fit into existing datacenters. Configurations have been defined to support general workloads as well as virtual desktop (VDI) workloads. Covering a range of affordability and structured around virtual machine count, these configurations should provide a good fit. What is really nice about it is that Lenovo business partners are willing, ready and able to further customize a configuration to meet your needs with speed and efficiency.

When you get right down to it, a product launch is a simple promise. At a minimum, it’s us telling the world that something new and different is about to be presented. That promise takes on significantly more meaning, though, when its impact stands to be life-changing.

In the case of this week’s Lenovo High End product launch -- the first-ever of Lenovo-branded enterprise-level System x servers -- “life changing” very well could be in the cards. The introduction of System x3750 M4, x3850 X6 and x3950 X6 represents previously uncharted territory for Lenovo (before its October 2014 acquisition of IBM System x). These powerful enterprise class servers help the company position for leadership in 4-socket and above systems – and they round out the company’s entire server portfolio as a whole. By virtue of this week’s announcement, the Lenovo server portfolio now sports everything from 1U to 8U -- with customer use cases that range from needs in the personal and SMB space up to the high end of the portfolio’s massive global enterprise workloads and solution requirements.

Just as Lenovo set out to achieve number one market share in the PC market -- and ultimately did so after acquiring another IBM entity – now, company leadership has its eye on achieving top market position in servers.

In fact, Lenovo has an even larger vision than that, a “Triple PLUS Strategic Roadmap.” This is the idea of offering a full portfolio that includes Smart Connected Devices and Infrastructure Devices and Software, all of which together create the Lenovo Experience. Thanks to recent acquisitions, Lenovo’s incredibly broad portfolio now includes phones, tablets, PCs, servers, networking and storage.

“But why,” you may still be asking, “is today’s announcement potentially life-changing?” The answer is twofold:

First, Lenovo-branded High End Servers already have an established client base, a proven market position and track record that includes seven winning benchmarks last year. The Lenovo High End Portfolio also offers a rich ecosystem of solutions and well-known global ISV partners that have worked with the company to bring to market the optimized solutions that enterprise customers need to successfully excel in today’s ultra-competitive world. These servers also feature world-class service delivered by IBM. Success is a given because many of the hurdles to entry for new products have already been cleared by these systems.

Second, the roster of unique use cases on Lenovo Enterprise Servers is continually-growing as more and more customers select X6 servers and x3750 M4 systems to manage their enterprises. Today, these enterprise servers are employed for everything from managing crucial transportation networks -- to crunching numbers in the kinds of complex analytics workloads that result in breakthroughs in many different fields – to driving core functions in such businesses as energy and public entities. Lenovo High End servers stand to drive some of the world’s most innovative enterprises backed by fearless highly-creative pioneers grappling for breakthroughs in their respective fields.

These High End servers enable business leaders to more easily access the actionable insight that’s contained in the mountains of data being generated daily. By virtue of the speed they bring to applications, the agility that enables swift changes in business direction and the constant availability that is inherent in this category of world-class infrastructure, these servers enable business leaders to achieve faster-time-to-market and faster time-to-value.

At the high end of the portfolio, X6 servers are at least 200% faster than previous generation systems. Modular X6 systems are agile, designed so that data centers can be fit-for-purpose. These systems scale seamlessly. Multiple workloads can be run simultaneously. It’s possible to change course if needed. X6 servers also are designed for enterprise environments in which resiliency is key. These systems also deliver constant availability and advanced RAS features, enabling customers to avoid “rip and replace.” X6 servers were designed for four target mission critical workloads: Enterprise Virtualization…Database…Business Logic, ERP and CRM…and Analytics.

x3750 M4, the other offering in the High End portfolio, is a dense 2U 4-socket server that is a great entry point into the enterprise space. This server offers leadership price/performance. It’s great for data-intensive applications, offering 25% faster memory, 33% more I/O and up to 3 times more onboard storage.

Learn more about the promise of this new technology. Perhaps your company will be the next to change the world….

As a member of the seasoned product marketing team that launched the System x X6 family of servers, Kathy Holoman has a rich history in technology marketing. Prior to joining the Lenovo Enterprise Product Group, Kathy held high-impact global technology marketing roles in four Fortune 100 companies (IBM, HP, EDS, GE) and one Global 500 organization, Schneider Electric. Her mission in life has always been to accelerate the sales process by helping sellers to articulate -- and buyers to understand -- solution positioning, value propositions and competitive differentiators. She translates technology attributes into tangible business value. Kathy’s ability to “tell the story” across a variety of marketing media and a span of several languages has been recognized not only with corporate awards such as the IBM Global Leadership Award, but also with Addy Awards for advertising, two international global events marketing best of show awards, and a top-three graphic design award in a field of more than 17,000. Read more on Linkedin or follow @techiewahoo on Twitter.

Support your core business operations with leading SAP applications, processes, and technologies designed to work together in a fully integrated business suite powered by cutting edge x3850 and x3950 X6 servers. The X6 solution provides a powerful platform for your mission-critical SAP Business Suite applications. Integrating hardware, software and memory advancements, the X6 enterprise servers are designed to be faster, more agile and more resilient.

X6 is an ideal platform for SAP customers that are looking for reliability, manageability, and scalability with the flexibility to run Windows or Linux. X6 provides a cost-efficient, scalable platform with superior performance and unmatched reliability.

"As part of our long-standing partnership with System x, SAP expects that the combination of X6 solutions and SAP’s market-leading in-memory platform, SAP HANA, will provide mutual customers with a simple, high performance platform to build and deploy next-generation, real-time applications and analytics." Kyle Garman, Global Vice President & General Manager at SAP

X6 offerings deliver important value to Lenovo and SAP clients

The X6 family provides unmatched reliability, manageability, and scalability in

Lenovo's SHAREit was a top 10 finalist in the CES 2015 Mobile Apps Showdown, where 10 presenters showed off cutting edge apps to a crowd of tech trendsetters and smartphone apprecianados.

Out of the 10, three were photo-sharing apps, including SHAREit and the top two for the event - Lyve and UCIC. There's a blurb about each below...

uCiC - A Global On-Demand Photography Network

My favorite of the day was uCiC, an audacious attempt to connect smartphone users all over the world and turn them into an almost mechanical-turk-style on-demand stock photography network. For example, if I was a music journalist covering a big festival like Burning Man, I could log on to uCiC on my phone and find someone at the festival to take a photo for me. And if for some reason, another uCiC user wanted a photo of my neighborhood park, I could take a picture the next time I'm there and earn points for sending it to that user. As someone who often needs to create visual content, this could be a great addition to the creative arsenal.

Lyve - A Single Hub for All Your Photos and Videos

Lyve, the runner-up, was also a cool concept, although one that I imagine has been done a couple times over. Not that that's a bad thing, lots of competition means it's a valid problem to solve and that the winning solution will likely be a good one. And maybe Lyve is that solution. If you didn't pick it up from the image, Lyve gives you access to all your photos and videos from your devices in a single access point. The presenter said he had something like 40,000 photos on his hard drive and used Lyve all the time to track down old photos. The interface and unique way of viewing photos organized over time seems to be one of the more differentiating features.

SHAREit - Lightning Fast Mobile to PC File-Sharing

If you've ever needed to transfer large files between PCs, or get photos or videos from your phone to your PC, then you could have used SHAREit to make your day a little bit easier. SHAREit eliminates the need to plug your phone into your computer when you're transferring photos, or use a USB key when you're trying to share files between PCs. Where it's really a time saver is when you're thinking that you need to upload something to the cloud to get it to another device that's nearby. When I tested the speed of SHAREit vs. uploading something to Google Drive, it was something like 100X faster.

What the demo from the Mobile Apps Showdown

Where are we in the Photo-sharing Apps Lifecycle?

Seeing photo-sharing apps continue to be so popular makes me wonder - how long until something comes along that completely removes the need to even share photos through an app? Seems like kind of a pointless and unanswerable question as I say it out loud, but stranger things have happened. Like planes and TVs and search engines and cell phones. We'll see if photo-sharing is still hot at next year's Mobile Apps Showdown.

Ever try to peel a potato with a butter knife? Sure, it’d work but the results would be crude, ineffective and you’d end up with a mangled, unappetizing potato. There’s an old saying, “choose the right tool for the job” and, when you have a heap of potatoes to peel, the ideal tool is a potato peeler. It’s optimized for the task with opposing blades, a comfortable handle and a special slender blade at the tip to effortlessly remove any sprouts. The result is a perfectly peeled potato. You ask, “That’s all fine; however, what does a potato peeler have to do with big data?” When you size the requirements of your planned Hadoop distribution, you can’t afford to base it on aging compute performance or sub-optimal reliability — that’s the metaphorical equivalent of a butter knife. You want a peeler to get the job done right.

Lenovo recently announced its all-new Cloudera solution for ThinkServer, which features incredible performance — using the latest generation Intel Xeon E5 v3 processors — and world-class reliability with ASHRAE A4 certification. It’s a terrific choice as an enterprise data hub, landing zone or data lake. The ThinkServer Cloudera solution is designed with ThinkServer RD550 and RD650 rack servers. By leveraging the capabilities of the Xeon E5 v3 processors, these systems offer astonishing compute ability for batch processing, enterprise search and advanced analytics, and deliver more than 2X greater performance than previous generation processors. Many competing Hadoop solutions are based on older generation processors, resulting in slower queries and slower time to value. That’s like peeling a potato with a butter knife, with mangled results.

World-class reliability is a key feature of the ThinkServer Cloudera solution. The included ASHRAE A4-compliant servers can run continuously at up to 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit), with no impact on reliability. That’s key, as many complex Hadoop queries will run at peak load for multiple days. Because these ThinkServer systems are certified to ASHRAE A4, they offer superior workload tolerance in demanding environments versus competing Hadoop choices that are based on the less-rigorous A3 standard, which can result in lower reliability and workload disruption due to system stress or component failure. That’s like peeling a potato with your fingers. Bad move.

So, if you need to peel a bushel of potatoes, get a peeler because it’s the right tool for the job. And, as you size the workload requirements of your Hadoop cluster, select the unmatched performance of Intel Xeon E5 v3 processors and the robust reliability of A4-compliant nodes. The Cloudera solution for ThinkServer features both as standard, and provides a compelling new choice for Hadoop distributions. It’s the right solution for the job.

The x3750 M4 solution helped Options IT increase its client base by 20 percent, expand services for existing customers and access the latest high-performance technology for outpacing the competition.

Overview

Options IT needed to deliver high performance financial trading applications – where microseconds count. Options IT needed a server platform with ultra-low latency, proven reliability with an efficient design.

Why Performance and Latency is Important:
When it comes to electronic trading operations, the difference between success and failure can be measured in a few microseconds. Today’s financial services firms need to be able to analyze vast amounts of stock data, run complex algorithms and execute millions of transactions per second. And they need to be able to do it all faster than the competition.

What Options IT Needed:“We needed to be able to host our customers’ trading applications on high-performance servers in data centers around the world. We needed a server platform that we knew was going to be reliable and efficient. We found all that and more with the System x3750 M4 platform.” – stated Ken Barnes senior vice president of corporate development

Was it Successful?
After its initial evaluation phase, Options began rolling out x3750 M4 servers to its data centers located around the world.

“We run a variety of applications on the x3750 M4 platform. Electronic trading is probably the most demanding, performance- wise,” says Barnes. “But we also use these servers to run everything from our core infrastructure services, including our email, Active Directory authentication and our file servers. And we also use them to run a variety of financial applications, some physical and some virtual, including portfolio management applications, risk management applications"

The one-year anniversary of the announcement of Lenovo’s intention to acquire the System x business from IBM is fast approaching. For those of us that were here during that last year, it often seemed like the actual transition would never happen. Let me tell you, preparing to transition a multibillion dollar organization to a new company while maintaining the business at the same time is no easy task. So it is safe to say that, while we knew the transition to Lenovo was an ideal move for our business long term, there was some anxiety in the short term.

That’s why I am thrilled to report that the System x business continued to lead the market not only in overall customer satisfaction during the third quarter of 2014, but also in every single individual component of product, sales and service satisfaction as measured by Technology Business Research (TBR). We didn’t just land first place in TBR’s study, we dominated!

This was a time period where we faced a lot of questions from customers about what would happen as we transitioned. It’s perfectly natural for customers to have concerns because they didn’t really know what was going to happen to our business; and certainly our competitors were doing their best to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about our intentions and capabilities. We knew that through it all, our number one priority in this critical time period was to continue to keep our customers happy. If we began to stumble with our customers while making the transition, we would have dug ourselves a very deep hole. But our customers stuck with us because we continued to deliver leading products, sales and service experience — and it was great to have this validated by the TBR study. We could not have asked for a better start to our rebirth as part of Lenovo.

This is part of a weekly series featuring content written by the Lenovo Companion App Content Team

A series of stunning data breaches made worldwide waves this year and will continue to get worse in 2015, according to the latest McAfee Labs Threats Report.

The fact that our personal security will continue to be compromised in new and different ways isn’t even the most jarring takeaway from the latest predictions from McAfee Labs. It’s where the threats originate that matters most.

For the average user and business person, the biggest threat to cybersecurity isn’t lurking behind padlocked doors or in faraway computer crime operations. For most people, the greatest danger is much closer to home. It’s us. The users of technology.

“Attackers often zero in on the trust we place in our devices, using it against us,” the report says.

Hence 2014 will be remembered as “The Year of Shaken Trust." Which isn’t necessarily a terrible thing, since the report makes it clear we may be relying a little too much on technology that’s often more vulnerable than we realize. A recent study revealed that 70% of connected devices contained security exposures and 80% didn’t require passwords of sufficient complexity and length. Meanwhile, 110 million trusting Americans have had their personal data exposed in some form over the past year.

At Lenovo, we take your security very seriously. It’s why we make it easy to protect your system from the latest threats and maintain partnerships with industry leaders to do so.

Still, there are some threats we should all be aware of. Here are three important things to know as we head into 2015:

1. Security isn’t always a given.

Many users assume the latest products come packed with cutting-edge security, but that’s not always the case. As the Internet of Things brings new capabilities to more industries, software and hardware complexities often outpace the ability to protect against advanced cybercrime technology.

In other words, the avalanche of new, cool tech toys is being greeted by cybercriminals who are working hard to stay a step ahead. “Attacks on IoT devices will increase rapidly due to hypergrowth in the number of connected objects, poor security hygiene, and the high value of data on those devices,” the report says.

2. Risks are surfacing in unexpected places.

The dangers aren’t limited to connected cars and smart appliances. Advancements in manufacturing and farming also pose threats to privacy and security of both individuals and companies. And then there’s the healthcare industry, one of the most alarming targets of all, according to the report:

“Healthcare data is even more valuable than credit card data because stolen health credentials can go for…about 10 to 20 times the value of a U.S. credit card number.”

Scott Parks, an electronic medical records expert at eScribe, says he’s seeing this play out in standard healthcare documentation around the world.

​“Health data is estimated to account for nearly 50% of all data breeches associated with identify theft,” Parks said. “The threats are as high as ever. Be smart about which facilities you go to for treatment and ask questions about the steps these practices take to ensure your confidential health information remains safe.”

3. No one is immune.

We’re all guilty of downloading a cool-sounding app from a trusted store and mindlessly clicking through installation buttons. Or quickly completing a credit card purchase after checking for “https” in the URL and choosing a reputable commercial brand.

It’s easy to get comfortable, if not careless, with transactions and interactions when it’s with an establishment that’s proven reliable in the past.

It’s our very dependability on these long-established Internet trust standards that will make them a target for attacks in 2015. The digital payment systems, mobile devices and even cloud storage services used by millions of people every day are all equally at risk. One particularly concerning likelihood is the growth of ransomware, which locks away personal files or data and requires payment from the victim to retrieve it.

According to McAfee, vulnerabilities like BERserk will continue to challenge our perceptions of trust and the security of sessions communicated over SSL.

Tips to Stay Safe

Short of avoiding all technology, it’s impossible to be completely immunized against security breaches. But there are steps you can take to minimize risks without becoming a Luddite. Here’s what McAfee recommends:

Keep operating systems, applications and security software up to date (System Update will do this in the background)

Mouse over hyperlinks to preview destinations before clicking

Download only reputable apps with high reviews, and don’t grant app permission requests without inspecting them first

“The weakest links in most security setups are users,” the report claims. It’s important that we all remain vigilant.

Lenovo Companion | Your Go-to App

If you like reading this type of content, make sure to check out the Lenovo Companion app that is preloaded on all Windows 8 and 8.1 Lenovo and Think systems.You can find it on your system in the Lenovo Apps section on the Windows Start Screen.

Lenovo Companion is filled with exclusive content to help you learn about your new Lenovo or Think system. You'll find quick-reference “how to” articles on everything from getting to know the preloaded apps on your system to how to use your new trackpad. And, in select countries, you'll be able to stay up-to-date on technology news with articles and blogs from trusted sources, partners and Lenovo Insider bloggers.

Be sure to note...the new version of Lenovo Companion is only available on Windows 8.1. So, if you’re running Windows 8 or an older version of Windows, now is the time to upgrade. Continue reading more about Lenovo Companion in this blog post.

For those reading who are new to Flex System, let me give you a quick overview before I get started. Flex System is an advanced blade architecture that integrates servers, networking, storage and system management capability into a single system that is easy to deploy and manage. Flex System has full, built-in virtualization support for servers, storage and networking to speed provisioning and increase resiliency. In addition, it supports open industry standards, such as operating systems, networking and storage fabrics, virtualization, and system management protocols, to easily fit within existing and future data center environments. Flex System is scalable and extendable with multi-generation upgrades to protect and maximize IT investments.

Today I’m going to talk about the Flex System x440 Compute Node. Lenovo is now shipping an updated version of this system — that utilizes the Intel Xeon E5-4600 v2 four-socket processor — and is optimized for high-end virtualization, mainstream database deployments and memory-intensive, high-performance environments. It is price-performance optimized with a wide range of processors, memory and I/O options to help you match system capabilities and cost to workloads without compromise. With a dense design, the Flex System x440 Compute Node can help reduce floor space that is used and lower data center power and cooling costs.

Based on Intel’s 22nm process technology, the Intel Xeon processor E5-4600 v2 product family provides a density-optimized, energy-efficient and compute-intensive 4-socket processor solution. As implemented on the Flex System x440 Compute Node, it can provide up to 48 processing cores and 96 threads per system, which is a 50 percent improvement over prior-generation products, and it maximizes the concurrent execution of multithreaded applications. The Flex System x440 Compute Node performs up to 40 percent better than previous models based on industry-standard benchmarks.

Other key features of the x440 Compute Node include 48 DIMM slots supporting up to 1.5 TB of memory for memory-intensive applications. This is 50 percent more DIMM capacity than competitive offerings — such as HP BL660 G8 — which enables higher utilization for large virtualized workloads. With four optional 10Gb Ethernet adapters, up to 64 virtual I/O ports for Ethernet, iSCSI and/or FCoE connectivity are available. The use of solid-state drives (SSDs) instead of or along with traditional hard-disk drives (HDDs) can significantly improve I/O performance. An SSD can support up to 100 times more I/O operations per second (IOPS) than a typical HDD. These features, coupled with the E5-4600 v2 processor family, provide a high-performance platform for demanding application environments.

In today’s data-driven culture, tools for business analysis are quickly evolving. Clients need a solution to effectively handle their transactional systems as well as accelerate their business analytics and reporting capabilities while lowering costs. Clients are looking for ways to consolidate their SAP landscapes and reduce complexity as well as integrate new analytics capabilities. Flex System supports physical consolidation to a small footprint and is designed to reduce the need for external components and cabling. Leveraging x86 virtualization technologies, you can consolidate your systems and get the benefit of resource pooling and autonomous peak load compensation for your SAP application components.

The Flex System management processes are designed to be application agnostic. But with the optional combination of Flex System Manager and the SAP NetWeaver Landscape Virtualization Management software you achieve an integration of infrastructure and SAP base application management. From within SAP, administrator interfaces typical tasks for monitoring and managing SAP ecosystems can be performed more efficiently and with fewer errors. You can accelerate key tasks like cloning, copying and refreshing of SAP systems while minimizing impact on source SAP systems.

To support today’s information-critical business environment, SAP HANA gives companies the ability to process huge amounts of data faster than ever before. The result is accelerated business intelligence (BI), reporting and analysis capabilities with direct access to business data residing in the SAP HANA In-Memory Database. Advanced analytical workflows and planning functionality directly access operational data from SAP ERP or other sources. SAP HANA provides a high-speed data warehouse environment, with SAP In-Memory Database serving as a next-generation, in-memory acceleration engine.

Delivered on Flex System x880 X6 compute nodes that provide leading performance and scalability, SAP HANA efficiently processes and analyzes massive amounts of data by packaging SAP’s use of in-memory technology, columnar database design, data compression and massive parallel processing together with essential tools and functionality such as data replication and analytic modeling. Using SAP HANA as transactional single-node RDBMS for SAP Business Suite, clients can benefit from the in-box memory scalability of the X6-technology.

Flex System x880 X6 is the first true enterprise-class database server for SAP application environments in the Flex System product line and is the world’s first 8-socket Intel Xeon processor-based blade server. It provides up to 2x the capacity of competitive blade servers5 and offers scalability from 2- to 4- or 8-sockets enabling you to scale up processors and memory for large SAP Business Suite on HANA databases or traditional databases. It allows you to add IT resource to your environment as your demands increase and offers enterprise-class server resiliency and availability to help maximize application uptime for critical SAP database and business applications. In addition, it provides the ability to integrate and optimize compute, storage and networking resources with simplified management using the no-comprise building blocks of the Flex System infrastructure.

The Flex System X6 Solution for SAP HANA is built on Flex System x880 X6. It is designed to enable clients to maximize the management operations of their SAP Business Suite application environment and give them near real-time insight into critical business information.

Speed system provisioning and cloning operations from days to minutes for traditional SAP Business Suite applications

Gain near real-time insight into business information and enable clients to identify trends in seconds instead of minutes or even hours

Enable common converged server infrastructure for SAP HANA and SAP Business Suite environments

If you have a traditional SAP application landscape with SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse and require high-speed analytics, but are not yet ready to move beyond SAP BW 7.3, the Flex System solution for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator is still an excellent alternative until you evolve your SAP application landscape. The Flex System solution for SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator provides accelerated analytics using the Flex System x240 compute node combined with v3700 storage. The solution provides an excellent alternative if you need high- performance analytics for your existing SAP BW environment.

The Flex System platform provides a broad set of converged solutions for SAP application landscapes from 2-socket application servers, 8-socket database servers and integrated storage and networking. It consolidates traditional SAP application environments in a state-of-the-art converged platform and allows you to integrate SAP HANA or the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator. Leveraging x86 virtualization technologies, you can reduce quickly deploy and manage these complex SAP application landscapes helping reduce total cost of ownership. At the same time, it allows you to add innovative applications such as SAP HANA helping to bring new enhanced business value.

When I was first asked to work with the Flex System team involving an Oracle software product half a year ago, I assumed my involvement would be very minimal and the experts at Lenovo would have me setup a switch and write a paragraph or two. There isn't much to be done on a self-contained project when it comes to any form of networking. With the Ethernet side, you configure a few VLANs and maybe setup a link aggregation while Fibre Channel is as simple as zoning some World Wide Names.

Things are never simple though (at least for me,) and my experience in Linux, DevOps, and servers made me a prime candidate for being the primary driver of the infrastructure for this project and to be a key part of the solution from planning to writing. Unluckily for me, I knew about as much about Oracle and Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) as I've shared so far in this blog post: zero.

Working with the Flex team and Oracle experts within Lenovo, I've had the chance to collaborate and learn with people whose view on what IT is diverges entirely from my own. My experiences within System x back when it was still IBM and now working for Brocade has given me a very infrastructure and technology focused view on the data centers that our customers use.

I cared a lot more about how something is managed and how well it sends raw packets than I care about how a customer actually uses the equipment we sell them to deploy an application. I'm not alone in that bottom up view of how IT works, but the people who view it from the top down were instrumental in making not only this project a success but Oracle RAC itself.

Seeing everything from the point of view of those within Lenovo who see IT from an end user perspective has been a very good experience. Traditionally, I've been a lab rat. Working for Brocade with everyone at Lenovo has taken me out of that role.

Oracle RAC

In addition to seeing IT from the end user perspective, I've learned a lot more about Oracle and their Real Application Clusters then I expected to ever know. Oracle RAC is software written to ensure that users and their applications have consistent and rapid responses to their queries.

These applications can range from someone in HR querying how much vacation someone has to a Big Data application trying to gain business insight into how much the color green can influence people to go to your store on Sundays. When a request is created from one of these client applications, it is sent to the server that is currently running that database.

With Oracle RAC, that database can be on any number of physical servers and can be migrated seamlessly in the case of any failures or rebalancing of workloads.

What this means for the administrator (the guy I've cared about) is that they can create policies on where their databases will be deployed and not have to get called in on a Sunday because of a server failure. For the user (the guy I am learning to care more about) he doesn't get exposed to any of this happening in the background. His database just works.

Flex System x480

For my friend, the administrator, the software is only part of what matters in a data center. When it comes to hardware, our project team selected Brocade networking (I can be persuasive) and the Flex System x480 X6 compute node and its corresponding family of components.

This compute node utilizes the Intel Xeon E7-2800v2 processor family and can scale into the terabytes of memory. The special sauce for these nodes though is in the fact that you can connect more than one together to form a single compute node.

Easily adding more units means our system can quickly have more cores added to an existing system, more RAM with smaller DIMM sizes, and we can be protected against even a whole motherboard failing.

Brocade Fabrics

The Brocade networking that we included in the solution is either the most exciting or the least exciting part, depending on how you look at it. It's extremely simple to setup and it just works. For myself and the engineers at Brocade who made the products, there is a lot of cool stuff in here

For the administrator deploying the equipment, both the EN4023 Ethernet switch and the FC5022 Gen 5 Fibre Channel switch are capable of forming fabrics. Fabrics mean a single point of administration and a very simple setup. With the EN4023 Ethernet switch, we are able to connect up to 48 units to form a single logical chassis meaning there is a single point of IP management.

With both the Ethernet and the Fibre Channel, no top of the rack switches are required to interconnect multiple chassis, consolidating equipment and saving capital costs without limiting the scale of the system.

Now What?

This all adds up to a very simple to manage and robust database solution. This has all been verified in the lab to work well together and tested against an IBM FlashSystem 840 to push the limits of what the hardware can do.

"Microsoft and System x have collaborated for years to deliver the computing foundation for achieving enterprise business results on x86 servers. That work continues as SQL Server 2014 provides groundbreaking in-memory capabilities across all database workloads, Windows Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V delivers breakthrough enterprise-grade virtualization technologies, and System x presents new mission critical X6 offerings.”

X6 and Microsoft SQL are FAST

X6 technology provides faster database performance through better bandwidth and lower latencies. Integrating an innovative design that locates up to 12 TB of ultra-low latency eXFlash memory-channel storage close to the processor, with higher I/O bandwidth that has been relocated for increased performance.

Huge memory capacity, with 96 DIMM sockets in the x3850 X6 and 192 DIMM sockets in the x3950 X6 (and with support for 64 GB LRDIMMs, you can have up to 6 TB of memory in the x3850 X6 or 12 TB in the x3950 X6)

New storage technologies, with eXFlash memory-channel storage that closely aligns the performance of storage with the power of the processors

The X6 Solution for Microsoft SQL Data Warehouse on X6 can meet your current demands as well as your future needs. That is because both pieces of the solution—System x X6 enterprise servers and Microsoft SQL Data Warehouse— incorporate built-in scalability that provides the performance you need now that is combined with the ability to add capacity as you need it.

Microsoft SQL Server AlwaysOn incorporates wizards that reduce customer-required set-up and tuning, and provides dashboards that allow at-a-glance insight into system health. The result of these built-in system protections is outstanding system availability and dependability for mission-critical data-base applications. By integrating these technologies into the system platform, the X6 Solution for Microsoft SQL Data Warehouse on X6 helps you:

Perform maintenance and serviceability faster due to the modular design.

Eliminate restarts and ease serviceability by minimizing the number of system “touches.”

You can depend on the System x Solution for Microsoft SQL on X6 to provide the speed, scalability and resilience you need to supply that information, along with the bottom line results your business demands.

Randall Lundin manages the High End 4 and 8 socket server systems as part of the Lenovo Enterprise Product team. Follow Randall on Twitter at @RWLUNDIN or view Randall's LinkedIn profile

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http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/x3500-m5-video-walk-through#When:13:41:00ZIn her blog post from yesterday, Jill Caugherty explained to you how the new Lenovo System x3500 M5 might be just what you need for your business.

David Watts is a Senior IT Consulting at Lenovo and team lead for Lenovo Press. He writes books and papers on many areas related to Flex System, System x and BladeCenter. Follow David on Twitter at @DavidAtRedbooks

Lenovo next-generation ThinkServer systems provide an amazing array of features and options so that you can design the exact feature set that fits your environment. However, if you’re not familiar with our new portfolio, the choices can be a little overwhelming! Do all AnyBay drives function with all AnyRAID adapters? What is AnyFabric and how does it fit into my networking architecture? Is there AnyTHING else I need to know?

Well, just like the CliffsNotes that my high-school friends used (if Sister Mary Michael is reading: it wasn’t me!) to explain the concepts of classic literature, Lenovo Press is releasing ThinkServer Product Guides to help simplify your server choices. And, like CliffsNotes, Lenovo Product Guides will help you get smarter faster!

Product Guides are currently available for next-generation ThinkServer RD650/RD550 and TD350 servers; available soon for ThinkServer RD350 and RD450 platforms. Designed to provide an overview of each server, condense technical information into a single document, explain available options and furnish ordering information, Lenovo Product Guides provide one-stop shopping for choosing your next-generation ThinkServer and options.

You hear it, though at first you don’t admit it’s a problem. But then your team’s grumbles grow louder. They complain that the system you use to back up your business is slow, unreliable and difficult to maintain. You even had to hire a full-time IT person to oversee its clunky old technology. So on top of its other problems, the old system has increased your annual operating expenses.

Since your business has grown like gang-busters – amazing sales in just the last year alone – you agree that your IT must keep pace, especially if you plan to achieve your 2015 objectives. It’s a new year, after all.

Here are a few key reasons why your team should choose the new System x3500 M5 tower to steer your business this new year:

All-in-one server ⇒ You can address your required workloads in this space-saving tower, eliminating the need for a rack. It’s compact and quiet, and can easily fit under a desk – perfect for growing businesses, franchises, distributed environments and remote offices. Plus, it has two 5 ¼ inch media bays for loading DVD-ROM drives with the latest software, or an optional tape for backup and recovery. But, if your business expands so much that you need a dedicated data center, you can use a tower-to-rack kit to convert the x3500 M5 into a 5U rack server.

Huge performance gain ⇒ Sporting up to two Intel Xeon E5-2600 V3 Series processors with up to 36 cores per system and 45MB cache, the x3500 M5 will jumpstart your company’s workloads – from point of sale to e-mail, file, print, web serving, database management, backup & recovery, and even virtual desktop. Low-voltage TruDDR4 memory provides you with abundant memory (1.5 TB) and energy savings. Optional GPUs accelerate your graphics workloads; and 12 Gbps RAID support can speed up your data backup.

Built-in, high-availability features to reduce your IT administrative time and costs ⇒ System x servers scored #1 in reliability out of all x86 servers in the independent ITIC 2014-2015 Reliability Survey. The System x3500 M5 incorporates many state-of-the-art, high-availability features to increase uptime, including redundant hot-swappable fans, redundant drives, and redundant power supplies. Light path diagnostics, in conjunction with predictive failure analysis, alerts you of components with potential errors by lighting the corresponding component’s LED on the server’s panel. That way you can schedule parts replacement on your own time and avoid the cost and hassle of unplanned downtime. Plus, the server’s integrated management module (IMM2.1) facilitates easy serviceability and maintenance, so you no longer need a full-time IT person just to keep your business running.

Flexible, extensive storage for your data ⇒ Your old machine’s storage capacity may be approaching the limit, making your daily backups slow and painful. The x3500 M5 has a whopping 72TB storage capacity with the new 6TB drives. Plus, it has a wide range of storage configuration options: up to 32 x 2.5-inch drives, up to 12 x 3.5-inch drives, or a unique combination of up to 16 x 2.5-inch drives and 6 x 3.5-inch drives in the same server, which you can leverage for tiered storage. Place data requiring fast access on the 2.5-inch drives, and older data on the lower-cost 3.5-inch drives.

Industry-leading security ⇒ The System x3500 M5 incorporates best-of-breed System x Trusted Platform Assurance security, an exclusive set of built-in security features and practices, to protect the hardware and firmware against malware attacks and establish a solid foundation for your workloads. Optional self-encrypting drives enable you to protect your enterprise data at rest, with a couple of options for centralized key management. With the recent high-profile security breaches you’ve heard about in the news, you can’t afford to take chances.

Cost savings ⇒ Not only can you reduce operating expenses by not having to dedicate a full-time employee to the server’s administration, but you can save ongoing energy costs through the server’s efficient titanium power supplies (96 percent efficiency) and extended operating temperature range (up to 40 C).

So in short, the System x3500 M5 can help steer your business to additional growth and profitability by increasing workload performance and storage capacity, reducing unplanned downtime and operational costs and protecting your firmware against attacks.

How’s that for an easy way of achieving your 2015 business resolutions?

Lenovo's DOit Apps family of productivity apps will be lighting up Sin City for CES 2015. You may catch us on the streets of Vegas surprising tourists with Mariachi band renditions of lounge-y classics, see us represented at the CES2015 Mobile Apps Showdown, or grab a selfie with us at the Lenovo Selfie Booth in the Venetian. But flashy pyrotechnics aside, you can get a quick sense for each of our apps - SHAREit, REACHit and WRITEit below.

SHAREit - Lightning fast file-sharing between devices

SHAREit is the fastest way to share photos, videos, music and more between phones, tablets and PCs. Odds are, if you're a human being with a pulse, you're taking the majority of your photos and videos with your smartphone. So what do you do when you want to share those files quickly and easily to a friend's phone, or get them onto your own computer?

You could rustle up a USB cable to get them onto your computer, but who's got time or patience for that. You could text or email photos from your phone to someone else's, but how about when you want to send 20 or 30 photos in a batch. SHAREit makes sharing your content easy and fast with no need to plug in cables and no limit on how many files you can share. Some SHAREit users are even transferring thousands of files at a time from one PC to another.

REACHit - One search across all your devices and the cloud

REACHit lets you access all of your files on any device or cloud storage account - your phone, tablet or PC, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Box - with one search. And when you find what you're looking for, you can move it or copy it to any location you want.

Need to grab a file from your home computer while you're at the office? Remember the name of a document you created but can't remember where you saved it? Want to move stuff from Dropbox to Google Drive to free up space and save money on storage fees? REACHit is perfect for any time when you need to find or manage the files spread across all of your devices.

WRITEit - A new approach to handwriting on touchscreens

WRITEit enables you to use handwriting in any app on Lenovo touchscreen PCs. What you can do with your pen is pretty limited today. There are a handful of apps, OneNote for example, where you can write in the app, and even then there's a clunky user interface (the touchscreen keyboard) that takes up half of the screen while you're writing.

With WRITEit, you get a more intuitive experience based on how you use your touchscreen. If you're browsing the web, sending emails or just posting on social media, you can keep the keyboard out of your way and just write directly in the app. Even if the app itself wasn't developed to work that way - WRITEit makes it work.

SHAREit is the perfect solution for holiday photo-sharing

Year after year, at the end of a trip to see family for the holidays, I find myself in the same situation - I've got 85 great photos on my phone, and so does everyone else in the house.

My mother-in-law wants all the choice photos on her PC...All the grown-up kids want to swap photos between their iPhones and Samsungs...And for the best of the best photos, we need to get on a tablet so we can run a slide show on the tv.

If this sounds anything like your family holidays, then you're probably using a hodge podge of Facebook, Instagram, emailing or texting to move all of these photos around. Even though you're standing right next to eachother.

This year, take a minute to download SHAREit on your phones, tablets and PCs - it's free and works for Windows, Android and iOS.

Now. Rejoice.

When you have SHAREit running on everyone's devices, you can send the best holiday photos, back and forth between any PC, phone or tablet in seconds.

Lenovo is nominated for the CES 2015 Mobile Apps Showdown Awards with the SHAREit and REACHit apps...and you can help us win!

The Mobile Apps Showdown is a fast-paced contest where contestants submit new apps. Both the audience and a panel of live judges are asked to weigh in on the apps based on “most likely to succeed” criteria. On the Mobile Apps Showdown site, you can try the apps, watch demos, make your feelings known, and ultimately vote on a winner.

The top ten apps will appear in the finals at CES in January for an action packed event hosted by Jon Hein from the Howard Stern Wrap Up Show.

Vote for SHAREit

SHAREit is a fast way to share photos, videos, music, contacts, apps and more from one device to another. SHAREit eliminates the need for cables as a transmission tool with zero network traffic, taking advantage of Wi-Fi hotspots to quickly transfer data 40 times faster than Bluetooth. SHAREit does not require an active internet connection, does not require data or incur network charges and is compatible with all file ormats. Transferring between devices can be done person-to-person or in a group setting, combining up to five devices for mass transfers of 300MB+. Simply open the app, discover available devices, select the file and just like that, the content leaps from your device to the other in the blink of an eye.

Vote for REACHit

REACHit gives you access to your stuff anywhere, anytime. Consolidate storage from all your devices and cloud storage accounts and manage it one app. Instead of digging through folder after folder looking for a file, REACHit gives you the ability to search across all your storage locations at once. With support for PC, iOS, and Android, along with the most popular cloud storage providers, you’ll have everything you need at your fingertips.

REACHit

• Consolidates storage across devices and cloud storage accounts

• Can search across all storage locations at once to find files

• Allows you to edit on the go and share files with others inside the app

Oracle Linux provides the latest innovations, tools, and features that enable you to innovate, collaborate, and create solutions across traditional, cloud-based, and virtual environments. Providing advanced scalability and reliability for enterprise applications and systems. Oracle Linux is free to use, free to distribute, free to update, and easy to download.

With an established proven track record of customer successes with Oracle and Linux-based solutions, System x can provide customers with X6 enterprise servers and warranty support. Customers can procure the Oracle Linux distribution and OS software support directly from Oracle.

Oracle VM Server is a free server virtualization and management solution that makes enterprise applications easier to deploy, manage, and support. Backed worldwide by affordable enterprise-quality support for both Oracle and non-Oracle environments, Oracle VM facilitates the deployment and operation of your enterprise applications on a fully certified platform to reduce operations and support costs while simultaneously increasing IT efficiency and agility.

Certified for Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Applications, Oracle VM allows users to create and manage virtual machines through an easy to use browser-based tool. For customers interested in deploying Oracle VM on X6 servers, System x can provide server hardware support. Oracle VM and software support is available directly from Oracle.

Every year, it's the same thing: Making - and then breaking - your New Year's resolutions. Well we've got some that are too easy (and too important) to break for 2015. Consider these:

Develop one new health-happy habit. JUST ONE. Very few people succeed in going from zero to 60 overnight. If you’ve spent a lifetime eating a chocolate-covered donut every night for dessert, you’re not going to wake up on New Year's Day and cut out sugar completely. And even if you did, it likely wouldn’t last long enough to have an impact. Instead, choose one thing to do differently… one thing to do better. Small, achievable steps are still steps in the right direction! Maybe start by getting a smart watch like the Moto 360 (which features Moto Body) and track how many steps you take every day. Then, challenge yourself to increase it week-to-week.

Pick a cause to get behind. Everyone should have something to believe in. Something they support and rally for. Find yours and put a stake in the ground. Here's a good place to start, in identifying your cause-related passion points.

Take control of your tech. Extend the life of your desktop or laptop by cutting through the clutter. Back up files, trash things you don’t need any more, organize your photos and videos so they’re more easily discoverable, and make your content available to you regardless of device or location, with the REACHit app. And if your tech is beyond the realm of recovery? Replace it with something smart AND flexible for 2015. Like a fancy Yoga 3 Pro!

Carve out time in your day to meditate. No, we’re not getting all spiritual on you. (Well, maybe a little bit.) Those in-the-know say that even a few minutes a day of quiet, reflective time can make a world of difference on stress levels, time management and creativity. So make time for yourself! Block 5-10 minutes a day on your calendar (in perpetuity!) and stick to it – use the time to close your eyes, tune out the world, and just breathe. Your body (and mind) will thank you. Namaste.

Re-read a classic. Go here and scan the collection of classic novels. Pick one, and re-acquaint yourself with it. It’s amazing what you'll get out of it the second time around!

There's a reason why we are for those who DO. We're a motivated bunch, always looking for a better way. Join us in 2015 and let's DO great things, together!

Ever wonder what your kids are clicking, tapping and swiping when they’re out of sight? Wish there were an easy way to regulate the websites they’re visiting and apps they're using?

If so, you’ll love the Family Safety suite of tools on your Lenovo system. This comprehensive feature is designed to keep parents both informed and in control of children’s computer activities. It’s the easiest way to stay tuned in to how your kids and teens are using your PCs.

You can monitor computer use, filter out inappropriate apps and even set curfews. Family Safety equips you with all the parental tools you need to teach safe and responsible computer use starting at a young age.

Get started with two quick steps in Windows 8.1:

1. Set yourself up with an administrator account

You can create a local account on each device in your home or use your Microsoft account for all the PCs you own. The key is making yourself an administrator on every system—this is the account type you likely set up when getting acquainted with your new Windows 8.1 system.

2. Create a separate account for your child

Once you’ve set yourself up as an administrator, create a child account for each young person whose activities you’d like to monitor. This way, the Family Safety feature will turn on automatically.

To create a new child account:

Swipe in from the right edge of the screen (or move your mouse up from the lower-right corner) and tap or click Settings, then Change PC settings

Tap or click Accounts, then Other accounts

Tap or click Add an account, then Add a child's account

From here, you have several options:

If your child already has a Microsoft account, select Enter email

To create a new Microsoft account, choose Sign up for a new email address

If you don’t want your child to have an email address, select Add a child's account without email to create a local PC account

Quick Tip: If your children are young and close in age, you can set up one account for them to use jointly. Is your little one too young to type in a password? Use a pictureinstead.

If your child already has a standard account on your PC, you can turn on Family Safety for that, too. Just follow steps one and two above, then select the account you want to monitor and tap or click Edit. In the Account type list, select Child.

That’s it! You'll now start getting reports on when and how your child is using your PC. You can add another person to help monitor at any time. Simply sign in to the Family Safety website using your Microsoft account and select Add parent—handy if a nanny or grandparent spends a lot of time with your child.

And this is just the start. You can block websites, set time limits and more.

Limiting Your Child’s PC Use

You probably can’t (and don’t want) to hover every time your child uses a digital device. But you can set limits using Family Safety.

Follow these instructions to set time allowances, filter websites, block downloads, rate games and limit apps. You may want to lock a PC during work hours when it’s tough to supervise, for instance, or control what can be downloaded from the Windows Store.

Using Reports to Monitor Activity

This is where Family Safety really comes in handy. By default, the tool is set to track all activity and email regular summaries of websites visited, games played, apps used and more.

If you want to delve deeper, you can do that as well. Online reports provide an abundance of information so you can see virtually everything your child’s up to, right down to what phrases he or she is typing into search engines.

Clicking any of the email links will take you to a more thorough web report, or you can sign in to Family Safety and select Activity Reporting. From here, you can see all kinds of details such as:

Specific days and times your PC is being used

Which websites they’re visiting (or attempting to visit before being blocked)

What your child’s downloading

How long each app is used and game is played

You can also adjust views and change how often reports are emailed.

With devices woven into virtually every aspect of daily life from an early age, many of today’s kids understand technology better than their parents. But that doesn’t mean you have to sit on the sidelines. Your Lenovo system is packed with tools that can make it easier to raise and protect your children in the digital age.

Lenovo Companion | Your Go-to App

If you like reading this type of content, make sure to check out the Lenovo Companion app that is preloaded on all Windows 8 and 8.1 Lenovo and Think systems.You can find it on your system in the Lenovo Apps section on the Windows Start Screen.

Lenovo Companion is filled with exclusive content to help you learn about your new Lenovo or Think system. You'll find quick-reference “how to” articles on everything from getting to know the preloaded apps on your system to how to use your new trackpad. And, in select countries, you'll be able to stay up-to-date on technology news with articles and blogs from trusted sources, partners and Lenovo Insider bloggers.

Be sure to note...the new version of Lenovo Companion is only available on Windows 8.1. So, if you’re running Windows 8 or an older version of Windows, now is the time to upgrade. Continue reading more about Lenovo Companion in this blog post.

In addition to having servers that are fast and extremely modular, imagine having systems that anticipate and solve pressing problems: safeguarding workloads to prevent small errors from becoming more serious; automating many of the tasks that database administrators historically have had to execute manually; and ensuring enterprise-level system availability.

Superior reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) features such as these can help you rest easy.X6 servers have three categories of exceptional RAS features: Memory Page Retire, Consumed Error Recovery, and Upward Integration Modules. Read a brief overview of each feature below and watch System x Senior Technical Staff Member Randy Kolvick provide an easy-to-understand description of the functions in the video, “RAS Features: System x X6 Servers.”

The way this RAS feature works is comparable to the manner in which disk sectors have functioned for a number of years; errant disks have been marked as “bad” so it wouldn’t be necessary to replace them. Memory Page Retire now handles server memory in much the same way.

Memory Page Retire is included in a patented algorithm that is smart enough to determine the instances in which different hardware and software features should be used to prevent repair actions and reboots. Thanks to the algorithm, the system determines whether reporting an error is the appropriate action or whether the error should be self-corrected and the server should be allowed to continue to run. Let’s say the system hits a correctable memory error threshold. Rather than issuing a predictive failure alert or taking other server actions, Memory Page Retire automatically instructs the operating system or hypervisor to mark the memory page as “bad” and then it moves the data. The system then automatically takes the bad memory page offline. (Another memory page is used in lieu of that unacceptable one.) Because X6 systems support massive amounts of memory – terabytes of it-- losing a several-kilobyte memory page is inconsequential.

Another benefit provided by Memory Page Retire is the fact that it prevents correctable errors from becoming more serious over time, decreasing the likelihood of a system reboot.

CONSUMED ERROR RECOVERY

What the RAS feature does: It keeps the server running in the event of an error and avoids impacting all the other work in process; bad memory can be corrected without a server restart.

Consumed Error Recovery automatically takes charge when an uncorrectable error makes it all the way back to the CPU into a running application. Although servers are running hundreds of processes at the same time, it is crucial to understand that Consumed Error Recovery only stops and corrects a process that is affected by an error. That particular running application is now able to “retry,” or restart the process as needed. Other work-in-process is unaffected so that you can continue at your own pace with the maintenance you’ve scheduled exactly when you’ve scheduled it!

While Consumed Error Recovery is a feature provided by Intel as part of its Machine Check Architecture, it is noteworthy that firmware, the operating systems, and the hypervisors all have to coordinate in their participation in the Machine Check Architecture features in order for them to function properly. The System x team has worked with major vendors in order to successfully provide enhancements and integrate all of the necessary software. In partnering with these vendors, he team added value above and beyond the Intel features and ensured that all of the features function in the manner intended. This additional effort alleviates deployment pain and unnecessary surprises in the data center.

UPWARD INTEGRATION MODULES (UIMs)

What the Upward Integration Modules do: UIMs enable two types of actions to be completed: 1) automating the movement of a workload from a server that issues a predictive failure alert to a trusted server in the cluster and 2) facilitating “Rolling Firmware Updates.”

Upward Integration Modules (UIMs) are plug in-software modules specific to tools such as VMware ® vCenter and others. The first action that UIMs drive is automating the process of moving a workload from a server that issues a predictive failure alert onto a trusted server in the cluster. The server automatically determines that the affected critical workload can be migrated off to the server that hasn’t had any errors. The system from which the workload was migrated can then be put into maintenance mode. Scheduled maintenance can be executed, and then that server can be brought back up-and-running later. Had the workload been left untouched and the error allowed to increase in severity over time, it could have become an uncorrectable error and ultimately resulted in an outage.

The same feature can be used for a second purpose known as “Rolling Firmware Updates” in which a workload is migrated off of the server so that a firmware update can be downloaded. Firmware updates are completed in an update service pack: a group of firmware is tested together to make sure it all works as a unified group. The update is then applied to the server and the server is restarted in order for the update to take effect. Then the workload can be moved back.

Once the first server is done, groups of servers then can be addressed in the same way. The process is automated so an administrator does not have to take each respective action individually as was required in the past.

Special thanks go to Randy Kolvick, senior technical staff member (STSM), Lenovo, for offering expertise and background for this blog post and for providing the opportunity to interview him for the video “RAS Features: System x X6 Servers.

About the Author

As a member of the seasoned product marketing team that launched the System x X6 family of servers, Kathy Holoman has a history in technology marketing that spans three decades. Prior to joining the Lenovo Enterprise Product Group, she held high-impact global technology marketing roles in four Fortune 100 companies -- IBM, HP, EDS, GE -- and one Global 500, Schneider Electric. Kathy’s ability to “translate a technology conversation into tangible business value” across diverse marketing media and several languages has been recognized not only with corporate honors such as the IBM Global Leadership Award, but also with industry awards for advertising, global events marketing, and graphic design. Read more on Linkedin or follow @techiewahoo on Twitter.

]]>2014-12-15T19:10:00+00:00http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/windows-trick-sharing-music-between-your-phone-tablet-and-pc
http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/windows-trick-sharing-music-between-your-phone-tablet-and-pc#When:17:37:00ZSo my wife has a huge music collection, something like 18,000 songs that she’s collected from the days when she imported all her CDs, all the music she’s bought from iTunes, and hundreds of songs from other sources.

It seems like every week there’s an album she wants to get on to her phone from her PC or vice versa, transfer an album she bought on her phone to my computer, and so on. It’s such a pain to grab a cable, load some software and copy music from one device to another, so we’ve always wanted something easier, faster and more intuitive to share our stuff.

Odds are that if you’re into music like we are, you feel our pain. So I wanted to tell you about one of the ways we use SHAREit to move music around between our devices.

Transferring music between your devices with SHAREit

When you have SHAREit installed on your smartphone, PC or tablet (it works on iOS, Android and Windows and Windows phone), you don’t have to plug in any cables, download stuff from the cloud, or launch any special music-sharing software. We love it for those reasons, but also because it’s just fast. It only takes a few seconds to get a song from one place to another.

Here’s a quick example of how easy SHAREit was for us to transfer music from my phone to the family PC:

1. When you open SHAREit and click SEND, you see all your music, organized by song, album or artist.

You can browse files and select any and all that you want to send to your PC. You can even listen to songs in SHAREit so you know you’re sharing the right one.

2. Once you open up SHAREit on the PC and click RECEIVE, the song transfers over instantly.

3. After the song downloads, you can play it directly from SHAREit by clicking on the little icon with the three lines on the right.

4. And then later if I want to listen to the song on the tablet, I can just copy it over from the PC, open it up and play it directly in SHAREit.

The file is stored locally, too, so if I want to open it up with our tablet’s music player, that works.

So Let’s Review

1. You have music on your phone, you open SHAREit and you click send

2. You select the music you want to share and continue

3. You open SHAREit on another device and click receive

4. Your file is shared instantly, and you can play it now on both devices

No cables. No clouds. Just an easy way to transfer music the way you’d expect... with SHAREit.

]]>2014-12-15T07:27:00+00:00http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/ryan-higas-lenovo-surprise
http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/ryan-higas-lenovo-surprise#When:03:17:00ZIn October YouTube Star Ryan Higa visited Singapore and gave a talk on the secrets of his huge success on YouTube to Lenovo's leadership team, including CEO Yang Yuanqing. As a thank you we thought we would surprise him with one of our favorite new machines. As you will see the unboxing wasn't exactly traditional Lenovo style, but the guys seemed to like it!

Our thank you gift to Ryan was of course the groundbreaking Yoga Tablet 2 Pro with its built in projector and incredible battery life of up to 15 hours. Check out all the Yoga Tablet 2 Pro features on YouTube or go get one at www.lenovo.com/yoga

]]>2014-12-15T03:17:00+00:00http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/lenovo-yoga-tablet-projector-mode
http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/lenovo-yoga-tablet-projector-mode#When:00:10:00ZMeet Tony. He's a U.S.-based field rep for the Lenovo Enterprise team and was recently one of many winners in an internal contest here at Lenovo, receiving a Yoga Tablet 2 Pro. Since Tony is a field rep, he travels a lot which means he doesn't have the luxury of using his Yoga Tablet at home like so many people do. However, just because Tony doesn't get to watch his favorite episodes or play e-games doesn't mean has no use for the Yoga Tablet. Check out his story on how he used the Yoga Tablet when he was in a bind:

Timing is a funny thing. I got in late last night after a rough afternoon of air travel on appointments. Got home at about 10:30PM, saw the Yoga Tablet, and I immediately charged it up knowing I was back on the road for the next couple of days. I stayed up to 2:00AM loading some videos and also loaded our new System X presentation so I can play around with it.

I was back on the road at 6AM heading to my appointment for a roadmap and enterprise presentation. When we got to the meeting there was no projector. We had a brief conversation and I said that I have a way of doing my presentation but to bear with me because I have less than two hours of familiarity of the Yoga Tablet. No worries though!

What a hit, I did the preso from the Yoga Tablet. They loved it and they wanted a demo unit. Before we went on to the next presentation of the meeting, I put on an episode of The Big Bang Theory and they were testing to see how large it could project and where it could project. We did walls and ceiling. It was a BIG HIT with them.

Tony's story pretty much speaks for itself. Lenovo builds amazing technology and it's the people (both customers and employees) who make the products shine.

“The System x3750 M4 performance, number of CPU cores, flexibility and density is unmatched,” says Eric Griffin, IT director at Fluent.“We have tested other solutions, but none of them came close to the low-latency performance, availability and expandability of the x3750 M4 servers.”

Why Performance is Important to Fluent:
The foreign exchange market needed to boost performance for high-frequency trading, improve operational efficiency and enable companies to rapidly respond to changing market conditions.

“We are always looking for new technologies that can trim off microseconds for our clients. System x3750 M4 can do many things at once to create the efficiencies needed for low latency. ” Moshe Roffe, CTO and head of IT and connectivity, Fluent Trade Technologies

“The costs of running a high-performance trading infrastructure can quickly add up. By maximizing rack density and energy efficiency, we can reduce operating expenses for both ourselves and our clients.” Moshe Roffe CTO and head of IT and connectivity, Fluent Trade Technologies. “System x3750 M4 can do many things at once to create the efficiencies needed for low latency.”

This is part of a weekly series featuring content written by the Lenovo Companion App Content Team

Once upon a time, employees entered the office, worked an eight-hour day and then went home. Those days are long gone. Rarely do we sit at one desk, in front of one computer, for more than a few hours at a time. Today’s connected consumers use laptops and mobile devices in coffee shops, meeting rooms, conference centers, hotels and even airplanes.

This presents a real challenge.

Using multiple electronic devices in various locations can create a data jungle. Files and folders are all over the place. Tracking down what you need at any moment takes time. Work projects are in one location, photos in another, and on it goes.

Cloud storage is a popular solution, but even these services can turn a tidy workspace into a digital mess. Wouldn’t it be great if you could keep everything in one or two places and then access your files remotely?

Well, you can.

There are several ways to access and control your Lenovo systems without being in front of them. For example, you can be sitting at home, connect to your work computer and use all of your apps and files just as if you were at the office. And you don’t need expensive software or advanced knowledge. These days, there are many easy ways to access multiple PCs without lugging them all around.

Connect to Another PC Using the Remote Desktop

One of the most user-friendly methods for accessing your desktop is by connecting one Windows PC to another. With Windows 8.1, all you need is an Internet connection and the free Remote Desktop App. Here’s how to use it:

First, you’ll need to set up the computer you want to access from another location:

Swipe in from the right edge of your screen.

Pull up the search bar and enter remote desktop connection, then tap or click Allow remote access to your computer.

In the System Properties dialog box, under Remote Desktop, make sure the Allow remote connections to this computer button is selected

Tap or click Apply

Tip: Make sure you’ve set your sleep and hibernation to Never. You won’t be able to access your PC from another location if it’s in one of these modes. Hibernation isn’t available on all PCs. Learn more here.

Next, you’ll need to make sure you know the full name of your PC. In the System Properties dialog box, click Computer Name to see the full PC name

Now, all you’ll need to do is enter that name into your other Windows PC—whether it’s another desktop, your laptop or a mobile device:

Swipe in from the right edge of your screen.

Remote Desktop to open the app

Enter the full name of the PC you’d like to connect

Tap or click Connect

Using more than one operating system? Third-party apps like Team Viewer and Splashtop make it possible to connect your Windows Lenovo PC to Mac, iOS, Android and Linux operating systems as well. Microsoft even offers Remote Desktop apps for Android, iPhone and iPads.

Control PCs Remotely

If you’re looking for a way to control (and not just access) your systems from another location, there are apps for that, too. Pulseway is one that enables complete control of your systems and applications from anywhere, at any time. These apps are built more for the IT professional, but there are reasons you might want them for personal use. For example, Team Viewer (among others) has support for a feature called “wake-on-LAN,” which allows you to keep your PC turned off until you need it and power it on when you want to use it—even when you’re not physically in front of it.

But wait, there’s more!

Find All Your Files and Folders, Fast

While remote desktop access is great for a lot of situations, it does come with a downside. Less experienced users may run into issues related to firewalls, networks and other settings. The average PC user may want to stick with cloud storage, or you might collaborate with colleagues who prefer a service like Google Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive.

While these solutions make it easy to access and sync files from anywhere, the challenge is remembering where you stored what and managing multiple passwords.

This new app provides a consolidated view of all the content you store digitally and lets you edit files in the cloud. And it works on all major operating systems and devices, from Windows to Android to iOS.

The important thing to know is that remote access puts you in complete control of your files, no matter where you are. Pick the solution you like best and navigate the data jungle with ease.

Lenovo Companion | Your Go-To App

Read more content like this in the Lenovo Companionapp, which is preloaded on all Windows 8 and 8.1 Lenovo and Think systems.You can find it on your system in the Lenovo Apps section on the Windows Start Screen.

Lenovo Companion is filled with exclusive content to help you learn about your new Lenovo or Think system. You'll find quick-reference “how to” articles on everything from getting to know the preloaded apps on your system to how to use your new trackpad. And, in select countries, you'll be able to stay up-to-date on technology news with articles and blogs from trusted sources, partners and Lenovo Insider bloggers.

Be sure to note...the new version of Lenovo Companion is only available on Windows 8.1. So, if you’re running Windows 8 or an older version of Windows, now is the time to upgrade.

This is the first-ever SAP benchmark by Lenovo. The system was configured with two Intel Xeon Processors E5-2699 v3, running IBM DB2 10 and SAP enhancement package 5 for the SAP ERP application Release 6.0. The server accessed the database on an IBM FlashSystem 840. See the results as posted by SAP.

The Flex System x240 M5 Compute Node achieved 15,640 SAP SD benchmark users with 0.90 seconds average dialog response time, 86,100 SAPS, measured throughput of 5,166,000 dialog steps per hour (or 1,722,000 fully business processed line items per hour) and an average CPU utilization of 99 percent for the central server.

Engineered for big data and analytics, cloud computing and business-critical enterprise workloads, Flex System offers outstanding performance with some of the highest levels of memory capacity in the industry. It’s part of the Lenovo converged infrastructure portfolio that delivers a diverse set of solutions from infrastructure applications to business-critical workloads. In addition, it supports open industry standards, such as operating systems, networking and storage fabrics, virtualization and system management protocols, to easily fit within existing and future data center environments.

Takeaway: The Flex System x240 M5 is Lenovo’s mainstream workhorse server for Flex System that supports cutting-edge technology, including TruDDR4 memory and the latest drive technology with PCIe NVMe drives. It has the capacity and performance for the most demanding applications.

Lets take a look at the unique modular “Book” design of the System x Enterprise Servers and how its better than a traditional rack mount server. The x3850 X6 is a 4 socket, 4U and 96 DIMM Enterprise server. The x3950 X6 is a 8 socket, 8U and 196 DIMM Enterprise server. These X6 servers are the sixth generation of System x Enterprise servers.

Clients can use these books or modular components to create a configuration that meets their needs. The new X6 servers have modular books for compute, storage and input/output. No need to pull the chassis in or out of the rack, because all chassis components can be accessed either from the front or from the rear of the server.

Each Compute Book pulls out the front of the server and supports 2 hot swap fans, 1 X6 processor and 24 DIMM slots. This allows the x3850 X6 to deliver up to 6TB of memory. The x3950 X6 delivers up to 12TB of memory. The Compute Book also supports the optional eXFlash DIMM memory-channel storage.

The compute book design allows clients to reduce acquisition cost and host multiple generations of technology in one server by upgrading only the technology that changes, minimizing TCO cost.

The Storage Book is a hot-swappable modular component where all of the internal storage for the server resides. This book supports up to 12.8TB of SAS 2.5” disk or 6.4TB of eXFlash 1.8” solid state disks.

It also contains two PCIe slots for disk controllers that provide maximum disk storage bandwidth. The storage book also includes the LCD service display, USB ports, and a front-side VGA port.

The rear-view of the x3850 X6 and x3950 X6, once again sports the modular book design. The rear contains the primary IO book, optional IO books and up to four 1400W/900W AC or 750W DC power supplies. This image is of the x3850 X6. The x3950 X6 doubles this.

The Primary IO Book hosts the integrated management module or IMM, PCIe slots, and the new dedicated Mezz-LOM slot that supports flavors of 1GbE copper and 10GbE fiber or copper IO cards

The Optional IO Books delivers an additional 3 PCIe slots – allowing up to 9 PCIe slots in the rear of the server. Optional IO books come in two flavors, a half-length IO book that supports 3 half-length, full-height PCIe cards, and a full-length IO book that supports 3 full-length, full-height PCIe cards. The full-length IO book support specialty Graphics or accelerator cards that may require 300W power

As you can see, all of the components in the x3850 X6 and x3950 X6 are modular, and can be accessed from either the front or rear of the server – never a need to pull the actual chassis out of the rack. This provides maximum agility to meet the client’s needs, maximum agility to grow, and maximum agility to deliver a lower cost of ownership

x3950 X6 - 4 to 8 processor scalability, Up to 120 cores of processing, Up to 12TB of memory, Up to 22 PCIe slots

x3850 X6 -2 to 4 processor scalability, Up to 60 cores of processing, Up to 6TB of memory, Up to 11 PCIe slots

Randall Lundin manages the High End 4 and 8 socket server systems as part of the Lenovo Enterprise Product team. Follow Randall on Twitter at @RWLUNDIN or view Randall's LinkedIn profile.

It’s a fact. Buying the right servers for your business is one of the most critical decisions you can make. Low-level security breaches are becoming increasingly sophisticated, costing companies millions of dollars in fines and lawsuits, not to mention damage to their brand and reputation. Take any one of the high-profile breaches that has popped up in the headlines over the last few months. You need a server that protects your hardware and firmware. Period.

Outage costs are mounting, too – to the tune of up to millions of dollars per day, according to a recent study by Aberdeen Group. Your server must maximize your uptime to facilitate 24/7 operations for your business. How can you afford an unreliable server? And meanwhile, since data centers typically spend a majority of their budget on power and cooling, the wrong server can waste significant energy, space and money.

The fact is, System x servers beat the competition hands down in security, efficiency and reliability.

Industry-leading System x Trusted Platform Assurance, an exclusive set of features and practices, provides the best protection in the industry and establishes a solid foundation for your workloads. System x scored the highest in reliability of all x86 servers, according to an independent ITIC survey. And System x servers deliver outstanding efficiency – with extended operating temperature ranges, dual fan zones, Titanium Power supplies and amazing performance.

We just released some competitive videos that show the bare facts – just how System x beats HP, Dell and Cisco, hands down. We encourage you to watch these videos (HP, Dell, Cisco) and learn the facts for yourself.

Jill Caugherty is the Worldwide Marketing Manager for the Lenovo volume rack and tower portfolio, based in Research Triangle Park, NC.

The holidays are here once again, and this year, we’re looking to do something a little bit special.

Since the start of 2014, our family has grown bigger with IBM/System x and Motorola joining us, as well as our online community that keeps expanding each day. With so many fans that celebrate the holiday season differently, just imagine if all that could be captured in one single moment to bring everyone together.

This year, we want to create the world’s first global 360° selfie, putting together a video collage of our fans all over the world celebrating the holidays in their own unique ways.

Please come and join us!

WHAT’S A 360-DEGREE SELFIE

HOW TO JOIN IN THE FUN

All you need to do is grab your smartphone or tablet, and head somewhere with festive lights or merry sights and snap a 360° selfie video. It can be at the comfort of your own home, while you’re out shopping for gifts or even on your year-end holiday trip. We’ll leave it to your imagination!

GETTING STARTED

If you’re ready to join in the fun, here’s how you can take part on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram:

For Facebook

Step 1: Take a 360° selfie videoStep 2: Upload your video to Lenovo’s Facebook pageStep 3: Tag @lenovo and include a short description of yourself - your name, where you’re from and where the 360° selfie was taken - as well as the hashtag #Holiday360. For example, “Happy holidays from Eiffel Tower in Paris from Tom and family! #Holiday360"

For Twitter/Instagram

Step 1: Take a 360° selfie videoStep 2: Choose to share on Twitter or InstagramStep 3: Upload to Instagram natively or share your Vine video or YouTube link on TwitterStep 4: Include a short description of yourself - your name, where you’re from and where the 360° selfie was taken at. For example, “@Lenovo Happy holidays from Times Square in NYC from Mary Kate and Ashley! #Holiday360”Step 5: Include the hastag #Holiday360 and mention @Lenovo (TW / IG)Step 6: Make sure that your profiles are public, so that we can view your awesome 360° selfies.OPTIONAL: Tag your friends in your status update to keep the challenge going!

Now that you’re all set to go, don’t forget to keep your eyes peeled for our updates on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages.

Air Traffic Control demands continuous availability software and reliable, robust platforms. Harris Corporation, an international communications and information technology company, needed an extreme high-availability solution to support its complete air traffic control software package as it rolled out new implementations in the Middle East, South Africa and South Asia. The solution had to meet stringent operational requirements.

For each airport site, Harris selected Stratus everRun, a downtime prevention software solution. To ensure uninterrupted reliability, Harris needed an extremely robust hardware platform to support the high-availability software. The company chose the System x3250 servers, which incorporate superior reliability features. In fact, System x servers scored #1 in reliability of all x86 servers in the industry, according to an independent ITIC Reliability Survey conducted in May 2014.

Harris met its clients’ rigorous requirements for demanding air traffic and airport control applications with continuous availability, management console duplication and redundancy capabilities. Francis Deault, Air Traffic Control Systems Engineer at Harris, stated, “If a failure were to occur on one of our servers, the System x Reliability Solution for Stratus everRun will keep operation running smoothly as though no failure had occurred at all.”

As a record number of consumers set out to browse and buy gifts online—an estimated $105 billion worth of holiday purchases will be made digitally this year, according to one forecast—Amazon’s technology makes it faster and easier than ever. Here are three ways you can use Amazon app on your favorite Lenovo device to breeze through every purchase on your gift list this year:

1. Find Better Deals

Between Daily Deals, Local Deals and Warehouse Deals, Amazon gives discount scouters a major advantage. You can see the steepest markdowns for big ticket items in a few clicks, and even get notified of the latest deals with real-time alerts.

2. Easily Comparison Shop

The Amazon Price Compare feature can be set to automatically match products you’re viewing—on any website, at any time…as you surf the web or view product pages. When a match is found you can see Amazon's price, customer reviews and other product info. The Amazon app can follow you to brick-and-mortar stores, too. Before you rush to the cash register, use your Lenovo device to scan the barcode and see what it costs on Amazon. See something on another website you’d love to have for yourself? You can always click to compare costs…then add the item to your Amazon wish list from any website.

3. Get Customized Suggestions

Product recommendations are personalized based on your purchases. Or you can browse the Top 10 sections, where items are categorized by best sellers, most wished-for products, gift ideas and more. The app even lets you whittle down further to view products by department—to see the newest releases in books, for instance, or gift suggestions for gardeners.

Put Convenient Shopping at Your Fingertips

Select Lenovo PCs and tablets have the Amazon app preloaded. To locate the Amazon app on your Lenovo system, simply go to the Windows Start Screen, All Apps view, do a search for Amazon and then choose Pin to Start or Pin to Taskbar.

You can customize alerts, displays and more to match your personal preferences, based on how you like to shop online.

Lenovo Companion | Your Go-To App

Read more content like this in the Lenovo Companionapp, which is preloaded on all Windows 8 and 8.1 Lenovo and Think systems.You can find it on your system in the Lenovo Apps section on the Windows Start Screen.

Lenovo Companion is filled with exclusive content to help you learn about your new Lenovo or Think system. You'll find quick-reference “how to” articles on everything from getting to know the preloaded apps on your system to how to use your new trackpad. And, in select countries, you'll be able to stay up-to-date on technology news with articles and blogs from trusted sources, partners and Lenovo Insider bloggers.

Be sure to note...the new version of Lenovo Companion is only available on Windows 8.1. So, if you’re running Windows 8 or an older version of Windows, now is the time to upgrade.

I recently started an Instagram account where I’m sharing photos of things related to ThinkPad design. I’ve already shared over 20 images and a short video clip. You can expect to see frequent additions. So far, the content includes, design sketches, people, study models, books, posters and objects within the design center that are connected to ThinkPad design. Don’t expect to see confidential things, I can’t share those. I think it’s a great way to quickly connect with people in a creative and visual way. If you’re a ThinkPad design fan, and want to get a glimpse into my design world, you can follow me at on Instagram at thinkpad_design.

Today, Lenovo announced that the new Flex System x240 M5 compute node has set a new world record for performance in the SPECjbb2013_MultiJVM benchmark among x86 architecture two-socket blade servers with the Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 family of processors. The 245,178 max-jOPS score is the highest achieved ever with the newest version of the benchmark kit, version 1.01. Flex System x240 M5 systems enable customers to increase infrastructure efficiency by driving higher transaction throughput with a reduced footprint via workload consolidation. This demonstrates Lenovo’s commitment to deliver high-performance platforms with industry-leading capabilities, capable of supporting critical JAVA business applications.

The SPECjbb2013 benchmark is the latest SPEC benchmark designed to measure JAVA server performance and scalability, and was developed from the ground up to address the latest Java 8 application features and performance elements. SPECjbb2013_MultiJVM also addresses current trends in data centers towards distributed deployments, such as virtualized and cloud-based environments.

The benchmark provides metrics of throughput (max–jOPS), as well as throughput for given response times (critical–jOPS) ranging from 10 to 500 milliseconds. It uses a model workload that handles a mix of point-of-sale requests, online purchase and concurrent data-mining operations. The results provide a measure of how quickly a server can process real-world JAVA applications.

The Flex System x240 M5 achieved a max-jOPS performance score of 245,178. IT managers will benefit knowing that their real-world applications will not need to be tuned to optimize for a particular operational scenario.

These results demonstrate best-of-breed performance that translates into reduced response times, which improves end-user satisfaction and speeds business decisions. Businesses will also be able to do more with less as a fewer number of servers are required to do the same work with associated savings in capital costs, space, power and cooling.

Innovative engineering and design leadership are the foundation of the Flex System x240 M5. The x240 M5 provides up to 131 percent performance improvement over previous-generation servers, delivering a best-in-class balance of CPU, memory, IO and storage. The x240 M5 is a member of Lenovo’s family of Flex System converged and integrated systems — a new generation of technology with more performance and bandwidth, true integrated enterprise SAN storage and far more capability than previous systems.

Visit the Lenovo servers page for more information about Lenovo servers and other enterprise products.

The SPECjbb2013 results and competitive comparisons represented here are current as of December 1, 2014. Results have been submitted to SPEC, and upon successful review, will be posted and available at www.spec.org.

Do you remember that moment when you realized you were getting older? It happens slowly at first – you start by running out of storage space at your house because you are hoarding old technology and stock piling holiday decorations. Then, you start to have memory lapses. You get your kids names mixed up or you forget where you parked your car unless you use the same spot every day at work. It would be nice if we could get a refresh, but we can’t. However, the products that we rely on to run our businesses 24x7 can and they did.

I mention storage and memory on purpose. As we slowly run low on storage and lose our short-term memory, our next-gen server products gain them. I guess that's our way of overcompensating on the ThinkServer team. The ThinkServer RD350 and RD450 rack servers have the latest Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 Series processors. Both the RD350 and RD450 offer 3.5- and 2.5-inch storage configurations – with up to a whopping 24 x 2.5-inch bays on the RD450. This platform offers huge advantages over the previous gen with up to 512GB of memory via 16 slots. Because these systems use next-gen DDR4 memory, you get up to a 50 percent boost in performance and up to a 50 percent increase in power savings – enabling your server to run faster and more efficiently...even if you personally are starting to slow down.

As a bonus, the RD450 2.5-inch configuration leverages the Lenovo AnyRAID design, allowing the use of your choice of RAID adapter without taking up a PCIe slot. This gives you more options. You are also able to upgrade your ThinkServer RAID adapter for additional RAID levels and flash-backed cache for both systems and for all configurations.

If you can only remember one thing – and I know some may be getting to that point – remember that both the ThinkServer RD350 and RD450 leave you with an excellent balance of performance, storage capacity and value. But just in case, bookmark this blog as a reminder.

This week marks another achievement for X6 servers – the seventh winning benchmark since their January 2014 unveiling. Achieved by the 8-socket member of the X6 family, System x3950 X6, the leading result not only represents the best TPC-E price performance of any 8-socket system, but also the figure is better than many of the 4-socket TPC-E results. The win highlights the enterprise business performance and value delivered by X6 systems.

This benchmark is the first-ever TPC-E result for Lenovo and the win is the #1 overall world-record TPC-E performance score. It surpasses other 8-socket figures, proving that the X6 server delivers 6.5% better performance and 6.3% better price/performance than its next ranking competitor.

The x3950 X6 test server on which the benchmark was executed features an Intel Xeon E7-8890 v2 processor (IVB-EX). The system has 120 cores, 240 threads, and 4TB of memory.

X6, designed on the foundation of Enterprise X-Architecture (EXA) is the first x86 server family conceived specifically for eXFlashTM memory-channel storage. X6 servers are designed for mission critical enterprise workloads such as infrastructure; database, business logic, ERP and CRM; and analytics. X6 servers are FAST, AGILE, and RESILIENT. Six generations of EXA servers have achieved more than 100 #1 benchmarks.

Takeaway: The business value delivered by X6 servers is proven by the fact that x3950 X6 now holds the #1 overall world-record TPC-E performance result, the #1 8-socket TPC-E performance result, and the #1 8-socket TPC-E price/performance result. X6 family member x3850 X6 (listed on the TPC site under the name of its former owner “IBM”) holds the #1 4-socket TPC-E performance result.

For more information about System x X6 server platforms,click here .
Results are current as of December 2, 2014.
The details of the 4P System x3850 X6 TPC-E result are here.

About the Author:
As a member of the seasoned product marketing team that launched the System x X6 family of servers, Kathy Holoman has a history in technology marketing that spans three decades. Prior to joining the Lenovo Enterprise Product Group, she held high-impact global technology marketing roles in four Fortune 100 companies -- IBM, HP, EDS, GE -- and one Global 500, Schneider Electric. Kathy’s ability to “translate technology into tangible business value” across diverse marketing media and multiple languages has been recognized not only with corporate honors such as the IBM Global Leadership Award, but also with industry awards for advertising, global events marketing, and graphic design. Read more on Linkedin or follow @techiewahoo on Twitter.

The x240 M5 supports the new Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 family of processors. The use of these processors improves productivity by offering superior system performance with up to 18-core processors and 45 MB of L3 cache. These processors support new features such as Intel Advanced Vector Extensions 2.0 (AVX 2.0) which enables acceleration of enterprise-class workloads, such as databases and ERP.

The x240 M5 support for up to 1.5 TB of DDR4 memory. DDR4 is the newest iteration of system memory which allows memory to operate at 2133 MHz but is even more energy efficient than DDR3 by operating at 1.2V instead of 1.35V or 1.5V.

Lenovo offers TruDDR4 Memory for use with the x240 M5. TruDDR4 memory has been thoroughly tested and verified by Lenovo to strictest standards. It is because of this testing that we’re able to supported higher speeds than the baseline memory speeds that Intel publishes (commonly known as industry standard or Intel plan of record).

Table 1 shows the Intel plan of record for RDIMM and LRDIMM, which is dependent upon the number of DIMMs per channel and the memory type.

Table 1: Intel Plan of Record

Memory Type

1 DIMM per channel

2 DIMM per channel

3 DIMM per channel

RDIMM

2133 MHz

1866 MHz

1600 MHz

LRDIMM

2133 MHz

2133 MHz

1600 MHz

By using TruDDR4 memory, clients can get industry leading performance with the Flex System x240 M5 node. Table 2 shows the improved speeds achievable by using TruDDR4 memory detected and supported by the system when installed.

The bottom line is that with TruDDR4 memory, you get the fastest possible speeds out of the memory subsystem and fully supported by Lenovo.

3. The Enterprise Chassis supports a full complement of x240 M5 servers, even with 145W processors

The Flex System Enterprise Chassis has enough power and cooling capacity to support a full complement of x240 M5, even when using the top-bin E5-2699 v3 and E5-2697 v3 processor models. This means in a single 10U chassis, you can have 14 servers each 18 cores and 1.5TB of memory. That means 252 cores and 21 TB of memory in each 10U of rack space.

The flexibility of the Enterprise Chassis means you can mix-and-match other servers from the Flex System family to meet your application needs. Also supported in the same chassis are our other Flex System servers, including the x880 X6 compute nodes with E7-8800 processors for enterprise-grade database applications, and the x222 dual-server compute node, where two 2-socket servers fit in one compute form factor offering the ultimate in dense computing.

The x240 M5 has two standard 2.5-inch SAS/SATA drive bays. However, for the ultimate in I/O performance, you can replace these with new PCIe NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) drives. These solid-state drives are directly connected to the PCIe bus of the second processor. Such connectivity, when combined with the I/O performance of SSDs, ensures the lowest possible latency while still using a standard drive form factor. Available drive capacities range from 400 GB to 2 TB per drive.

A screen grab of our walk-through video where we describe the new PCIe NVMe drives with the x240 M5

5. Embedded virtualization with RAID-1 SD Cards

The x240 M5 supports the VMware vSphere (ESXi) hypervisor on one or two SD cards with the optional SD Media Adapter. This adapter is installed in a dedicated slot under I/O Adapter slot 1, as shown in the following photograph.

The adapter offers built-in RAID-1 capability when two SD cards are installed. This means that if an SD card fails, the adapter will manage the failure and the system will continue without operation.

The SD Media Adapter is also quite versatile in that it allows you to create other volumes on the SD cards (up to 16 in total) and these are visible to the UEFI as bootable devices if needed. This means other you can use the SD cards to house deployment tools and other support programs as needed by your organization.

Clients are seeking to deploy services faster, to scale infrastructure rapidly, to analyze new data and to deliver all of these new capabilities at much lower costs than ever before.

One key IT response has been the move to "converged infrastructure"— compute, storage and networking in a single framework approach. Using converged infrastructure, clients have expected to achieve 20-to-30 percent improvements in time to deploy systems and similar improvements in utilization and IT staff productivity. In fact, clients using Flex System and the pre-integrated and pre-tested and configured Flex System Integrated Infrastructure have achieved much more. These clients can activate services in minutes or hours rather than days or weeks, have saved up to 47 percent in time to manage IT systems, have improved utilization by 25 percent and reduced downtime by up to 97 percent.

Enter into the smarter era of computing with the new converged Flex System Integrated Infrastructure from Lenovo. The Flex System Integrated Infrastructure is a complete, flexible infrastructure system with integrated expertise all built from the extensive portfolio of Flex System. The system integrates and optimizes all compute, storage and networking resources to deliver infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) out of the box. And it does all this with integrated and simplified infrastructure management. You can start with these flexible, open infrastructure services that save time, resources and cost across the IT lifecycle, and add your choice of applications.

The Flex System Integrated Infrastructure includes integrated expertise designed to automate and optimize the deployment and maintenance of your workloads. A 2013 study by IDC found that customers were able to deploy 55 percent faster than conventional systems. Consolidation and management expertise from thousands of successful data-center optimizations drives automation to significantly reduce manual processes that consumes too many staff hours. Optimization expertise also allows your infrastructure to dynamically flex to address unexpected demands without requiring expensive surplus capacity.

This new system is designed to provide a simplified experience and reduce IT complexity without compromising the flexibility you need. By delivering both simplicity and flexibility in a system with integrated expertise, you can rapidly deploy IT services and keep them running at the performance levels your business demands while still managing costs.

Simplified and reliable acquisition with a Lenovo Flex System Integrated Infrastructure

The simplicity of a Flex System Integrated Infrastructure begins with acquisition. You can choose a pre-defined and fully integrated, optimized configuration as your starting point. Your solution will ship to you as a complete, fully-tested and configured package of compute, storage and networking resources on which you and Lenovo Business Partners can customize a solution. With built-in expertise for deployment, management and optimization — including cloud capabilities — to simplify key tasks across all of your IT resources, your system is designed to deploy quickly and be easy to manage. You can select the capabilities you need based on your target workload and environment.

More about John Biebelhausen

John Biebelhausen has over twenty five years of product marketing leadership including product management, product marketing, social and digital marketing, brand strategy, marketing communications and strategic planning of cutting-edge technology solutions and product offerings. John has worked at industry-leading technology companies including IBM, Sharp Labs, Dell and numerous venture-backed, start-up companies. His current role is Worldwide Product Marketing Manager for Lenovo Flex System Integrated Infrastructure Offerings.

(Illustration credit: supermod Erik - who also came up with most of the Communities' graphics and our 5th year anniversary logo.)

Slightly more than three years ago I was approached about a role within the Lenovo Forums Community, and being a non-techie, was fascinated by the folks I saw active here.

There was just so much being shared, and people weren't selfish at all about helping others; in fact, there were (and still are) community users who spend most of their time here, just wanting to help - with no strings attached or expectations whatsoever.

I was amazed then, and am still amazed now - and salute you.

As we enter our seventh year of operations, and grow even bigger, on a personal note I am really looking forward to meeting new people and making new friends from around the world. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for being on the journey with us. I am truly blessed to be working with the group of moderators and gurus (and the community at large), and have really learned a lot the past few years here.

And I am not the only one. Here's a few thoughts from some of the very special people who have grown with us along the way:

“It’s not easy to be where we are today which was from zero to 400k+ registered users, and we grew from initially 18,000 topics first year to now 32,000 topics, and this sheer volume is growing still.

It’s like watching a baby growing into a young adult. There is now more attention given to Lenovo Forums by online users, and I am so proud to tell others that I’m part of the forum team. More and more great volunteers have joined our squad and become forum advocates and I am so happy to work with them.

With anything there will of course be growing challenges and there is no finish line so we have to keep moving forward. There are 4 language communities at the moment and we are looking at expanding even more.

Can't wait. Hang in there Lenovo Forums. Happy 7th birthday.”

- English Community Lead, Cleo_Lenovo

"Like most of my work, the idea came to me late at night during a bout of insomnia. A lack of sleep can be quite inspirational—even if unintentional. The original graphics from the early forum days surrounded a birthday cake concept. As the forum matured I felt a more grown-up design was appropriate. Maybe we'll see another TrackPoint cake next year. It's good to mix things up.

I can only hope that my contributions—both graphical and technical—have improved users' experience in visiting the forum. Much of my design work is outdated at this point so it's probably time to put pen to paper and draw up something new.

Having been with the forum from pre-launch to today, it's reassuring to see close to half a million user IDs registered. While numbers aren't everything, it shows that forums still provide an important, interactive and relevant experience different from other social media channels. The other channels might be more urgent and immediate in nature but forums remain the granular, technical repository for archival-quality material. I see forums as a long-term solution for technical content where blog-style content such as Facebook and Twitter are better geared for marketing purposes. None, however, are mutually exclusive and each has their place in a product owner's opportunities to interact with a brand and its user base."

-supermod erik

"This big community is great and unique! It can offer so much help and enable so much contact and feedback between users like no one else. The vast amount of knowledge from their members can help from the easiest set up question up to serious hardware modding.

I haven't done much "moderator work" but mostly helping users with tech problems and informing them about how to keep the notebooks working cool. I'm mainly active in the Spanish and English communities (with some visits to the German community as well) and it's very interesting to see that many times the questions and problems users have are the same, despite language, cultural differences and geographical location.

I like helping users, specially when I see they can really profit from my tips and/or answers. That said, one of my main grunts with the forum software is the limited capability to upload pictures, I see some room for improvement there, like allowing external links from Picasa or other photo hosting companies. Also the Avatars could be bigger.

- moderator Tasurinchi

Thanks again, one and all for your conversations and help these seven years. Here's to more!

Here are five more steps you can take to protect yourself and loved ones this holiday season. All are recommended by Lenovo security partner McAfee®:

1. Never share a password

If your bank or a service you use asks for your credentials on the phone, hang up. These are people posing as brands. When someone calls to say there’s something wrong with your account, it’s a sure sign someone’s trying to steal your personal information. To stay safe you can call the company at the official main number for verification.

2. Shop with caution

More and more shopping is taking place online, making e-retailers prime targets for cybercriminals. Check online stores’ web addresses and make sure they include “HTTPS” to help keep your credit card info safe with data encryption. McAfee also suggests using one credit card for all your online transactions so it’s easy to spot any purchases you didn’t make. And be wary of shipping notifications during online shopping, as many are fake and intended to steal your data.

Shop safe quick tip: Use one credit card to buy all holiday gifts. Click to Tweet

3. Bank carefully

People tend to spend more money during the holidays than they do all year. Cyber criminals may use this fact to more easily scam consumers. Be aware of your surroundings when using ATMs and don’t withdraw money if anything looks amiss. Loose wires or machine parts that may have been tampered with could indicate hackers are trying to “fix” the machine for their benefit.

4. Protect your mobile devices

Many mobile apps make it easy to shop on the go and add some fun to your holidays. Before you download anything new, review the app to make sure you know exactly what you’re putting on your device. Avoid anything that’s not available in an official app store or that requests too many permissions. If you use a mobile browser frequently, you can also add an extra layer of protection by installing software such as McAfee SiteAdvisor® to be warned before you access a questionable website.

Did you know? Your smartphone’s a PC that needs protection, too. Click to Tweet

5. Stay informed

Identity theft happens all year but tends to increase during heavy shopping seasons. Follow breaking stories from official news outlets to stay informed of any new vulnerabilities. This way you can be sure to shop for holiday gifts at retailers you know have not been compromised. Have you received notice of a potential security breach from a store where you’ve shopped? Check your credit card statements frequently to make sure you weren’t affected.

Lenovo Companion | Your Go-To App

Read more content like this in the Lenovo Companionapp, which is preloaded on all Windows 8 and 8.1 Lenovo and Think systems.You can find it on your system in the Lenovo Apps section on the Windows Start Screen.

Lenovo Companion is filled with exclusive content to help you learn about your new Lenovo or Think system. You'll find quick-reference “how to” articles on everything from getting to know the preloaded apps on your system to how to use your new trackpad. And, in select countries, you'll be able to stay up-to-date on technology news with articles and blogs from trusted sources, partners and Lenovo Insider bloggers.

Be sure to note...the new version of Lenovo Companion is only available on Windows 8.1. So, if you’re running Windows 8 or an older version of Windows, now is the time to upgrade.

This week, Lenovo launched REACHit, an app for Android and Windows PC (iOS coming soon) that makes it easy for you to access and organize files across Google Drive, Dropbox, Box and OneDrive. It’s part of our effort to make your Lenovo machine, Android and iOS devices work together to simplify your life.

In the spirit of helping you manage your personal cloud across devices, we’ve created a short list of tips for conquering your personal cloud. Have your own tips? Regale us with your epic cloud conquests in the comments below.

1. Pay for just what you need today

How much free cloud-storage do you need? A couple gigs? 100 gigs? A terabyte?

Take a minute to think about what you need in the short term from your cloud. Are you just using your cloud like a hard-drive to store documents and photos? Or do you plan to use the cloud for sharing massive files with collaborators? Either way, there’s a minimum amount of storage you can get away with for now. So pay for (or get for free) only what you’ll be needing in the short term, rather than buying that terabyte “just in case”.

Below is a helpful chart created by CNET that can help you make a quick decision on what works for you.

2. Test your upload/download speeds at home and the office

Depending on your connection speed, uploading and downloading files from the cloud can be fast. Or very, very, slow.

When I’m at a Starbucks or on the guest wi-fi at the office, I’ll do a quick bandwidth test with Speedtest.net. Depending on the down/up speeds, I’ll wait to get home (where I have the maximum bandwidth my provider offers) so I can save time on files more than 100 MBs.

3. Save the best of the Web to Google Drive

If you create a lot of presentations like I do, Google Image search can be your best friend for slide visuals. I use it so much that I end up searching for the same images over and over (like “Sales and Marketing Funnel” or “Android Tablet”).

To save time, I started using the Chrome extension Save to Google Drive to keep track of my presentation images and store copies of reference articles and other research nuggets.

4. Take advantage of Dropbox’s free storage incentives

Dropbox has made it easy to get from 125MB to up to 32GB of extra storage space just for inviting friends and connecting your social accounts. If you’re looking to ramp up storage without the pain of a monthly charge hitting your bank account, this is a simple way to do it.

5. Use REACHit to link Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and Box

REACHit is a free tool that you can download on your PC or Android device and quickly connect to the most popular personal cloud-storage apps. Once you create an account with REACHit, you can search for and access your files not just on all your cloud accounts, but also on your other devices.

So when you’re on your tablet at the airport and realize you need a file from your home or work PC, you can launch REACHit and grab the file. In the same session, you can copy it over to one of your cloud accounts so you’ll have it handy in the future when you’re not on one of your machines.

NeXtScale WCT (Water Cool Technology) is the most efficient NeXtScale systems yet, due to both the efficiency of direct water cooling, and the additional performance and power savings achieved by running the high power electronics at lower temperatures than possible with air cooling.

I made the long trek from Vancouver, Canada to Morrisville, North Carolina to visit the new Lenovo facilities and work with the NeXtScale WCT team and the Lenovo Press team (formerly the Redbooks team) to produce the NeXtScale WCT Product Guide. This blog highlights what I learned during my week-long visit.

Here’s a look at one of new buildings at the Lenovo campus - the new home of product development for NeXtScale WCT

Most of development of the water-cooled variant of the NeXtScale n1200 chassis, and nx360 M5 compute nodes was in the thermal lab. It is here in the thermal lab that the manifolds for the chassis were designed, the circulation path for the water was determined, the front and rear conduction plates were shaped, and other specialized parts originated. Not only did the engineers assure that the systems were adequately cooled, but they studied the effect of temperature on the performance of the system.

Here’s a photo of a rack of prototype nodes under test, along with thermal probes and an instrumented water system.

While I was in Raleigh working on the Product Guide, we also shot a video where we went through all the components that make up the WCT system. We actually filmed it right next to the rack while it was fully loaded and running at maximum CPU utilization. Because the WCT is cooled with water and not with dozens of fans, we were able to carry on a conversation without having to shout at each other. Very cool!

Here’s a screen grab from our video where we’re going through the water circulation components. I’m with David Watts from the Lenovo Press team (white shirt) and Mark Steinke, senior engineer from the thermal lab (blue shirt).

The photo below shows two NeXtScale compute nodes on the one tray. Two NeXtScale nx360 M5 WCT nodes are paired together on a full wide compute tray to make most efficient use of the water flow. Each tray has one water inlet and one water outlet; the cooling water flow is split for each node inside the tray, and collected from each node before exiting.

The processor heat sinks and the conduction plates (front and rear) are directly cooled with water. The conduction plates are shaped to directly contact several integrated circuits on the main board of the servers, and copper tubes connect the thermally conductive material between the DIMMs, and other heat sinks, to the conduction plates.

One of the interesting findings from the testing in the thermal lab is that the cooling water can be as warm as 45 ºC (113 ºF) and still cool everything more effectively than air, while providing lower power consumption (about 5%) and higher performance (thanks to Intel Turbo Boost) than air cooled systems. This means that, in most climates, the water used to cool the servers can then be cooled with ambient air, no chillers required.

The photo below shows the rear of a rack of water cooled NeXtScale systems. Notable are the filler panels where the chassis fans used to be. Cooling fans are noisy and inefficient and just not needed when you have water cooling!

The two vertical hoses connect all the water manifolds. There is one external connection to each chassis for the inlet water manifold, and one external connection to the outlet water manifold. Each manifold has 6 internal connectors, one for each compute tray location in the chassis. These connectors enable the compute trays to be installed or removed while there is water flowing through other nodes.

Unique to the WCT chassis are drip sensors, one under each manifold; if any drips are detected, the Fan and Power Controller (FPC) is notified, and the FPC can send an alert.

The power supplies used are the same as for the air cooled NeXtScale systems. They have variable speed fans, and pull cooling air through the nodes to cool the few non-water cooled components as well as the power supplies themselves.

If you are looking for a solution with a chilled water loop and cooling distribution unit, like the one in the lab – but without the instrumentation – the team can provide the specifications and suggest commercially available systems.

The NeXtScale nx360 M5 nodes support processors up to 18 cores and 256 GB RAM, so a rack with 6 full chassis – 72 nodes – can provide 2,592 cores and 18,432 GB RAM. A very compute dense solution is manageable with the cooling made possible by the WCT approach.

For more information about the WCT solution, see the NeXtScale M5 product page. And stay tuned for the Product Guide and our walk-through video.

Duncan Furniss is a Consulting Client Technical Specialist for Lenovo in Canada. He provides technical sales support for iDataPlex, NeXtScale, BladeCenter, Flex and System x products, and has co-authored several IBM Redbooks publications, including the IBM NeXtScale System Planning and Implementation Guide. Duncan has designed and provided oversight for the implementation of many large-scale solutions for HPC, distributed databases, and rendering of computer generated images.

This is part of a weekly series featuring content written by the Lenovo Companion App Content Team

‘Tis the season! For cyber threats, that is. In countries around the world, the months between November and January are filled with more shopping, more parties and more online travel bookings. With so many people rushing from one happy activity to the next, cybercriminals have a lot of opportunities for scams and hacks.

Lenovo security partner McAfee® recently released its annual 12 Scams of the Holidays—and it includes some surprises this year. You probably know to protect your PC and avoid scammy email attachments. But do you also safeguard your smartphone? And take extra precautions with USB drives?

We chatted with McAfee’s Chief Consumer Security Evangelist, Gary Davis, about this year’s list and the important precautions you may not think to take. Here’s what you need to know now:

1. Smartphones are not as safe as you may think

People tend to use smartphones as, well…phones. But these devices are actually small computers that need many of the same safeguards used to secure large desktop PCs. In fact, some of the most malicious malware out there today—the kind that can harvest your bank account info—has been completely reformatted to attack mobile devices.

“The challenge here is that we’re seeing a dramatic increase in malware targeting mobile devices,” Davis said. “While most people would think twice about opening suspicious email on a PC, they tend to be more hurried when using a phone. And this is where problems begin.”

Other methods used by hackers include mobile gaming apps that ask for every permission possible and unsecure public Wi-Fi networks.

And then there are the less sophisticated (but equally damaging) threats, such as the increased likelihood for phones to be stolen at holiday parties and events. Most phones store all kinds of passwords and, left unprotected, could wreak havoc if placed in the wrong hands. If you don’t enable your smartphone’s lock and locate capabilities, everything on it will be immediately available to anyone who finds it.

Only download apps from an official app store and avoid any that ask for too many permissions

2. There’s no such thing as a free (and safe) USB drive

Branded USBs are popular as giveaways this time of year, particularly in the business community. But these handy little drives are incredibly vulnerable. Damaging, undetectable software is sometimes pre-installed on them, usually without the giver knowing it.

And with USB flash drives, there’s currently no way of knowing you’re a target until your PC is under attack. That’s because the threat is so new.

“A massive vulnerability was exposed within USB firmware a couple of months ago,” Davis said. “At least for a little while, I strongly encourage people not to use USBs they receive in gift baskets or as giveaways.”

Lenovo Companion | Your Go-To App

Read more content like this in the Lenovo Companionapp, which is preloaded on all Windows 8 and 8.1 Lenovo and Think systems.You can find it on your system in the Lenovo Apps section on the Windows Start Screen.

Lenovo Companion is filled with exclusive content to help you learn about your new Lenovo or Think system. You'll find quick-reference “how to” articles on everything from getting to know the preloaded apps on your system to how to use your new trackpad. And, in select countries, you'll be able to stay up-to-date on technology news with articles and blogs from trusted sources, partners and Lenovo Insider bloggers.

Be sure to note...the new version of Lenovo Companion is only available on Windows 8.1. So, if you’re running Windows 8 or an older version of Windows, now is the time to upgrade.

GUEST BLOG by David Tareen. David is the Director of Product Marketing for Flex System.

What is one of the top challenges for IT departments? The need to deploy sophisticated and advanced technology that can help meet their needs faster and at lower cost. Many data centers are successfully addressing this challenge with converged infrastructure (CI), which include servers, networking, storage and management designed to work together as a single unit. The unique characteristics of CI enable IT departments to add applications and capabilities quickly, and thus provide their businesses with a competitive advantage.

The basic premise behind CI is simple; as we integrate components, the cost and the complexity flows out. Customer-focused CI vendors will take a solutions approach to extend the basic premise by integrating software along with the hardware.

Take virtual desktop computing (VDI) as an example. A traditional VDI solution can help consolidate call-center IT to reduce cost and improve security. A more advanced VDI solution can enable deployment of applications across an enterprise and support bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiatives. So what is needed to deploy a VDI solution? It takes servers, networking, storage, virtualization technology, management of both physical and virtual desktop environment, cabling, PDUs and thermal consideration. In short, it requires a lot.

A CI solution specifically for VDI can simplify this complexity. Design guides and reference architectures provide guidance and ensure interoperability. Lenovo provides this guidance here for the Flex System VDI solution by partnering with VMware. The newly announced FlexPac promotion on Flex System makes acquiring this VDI solution more affordable than ever.

So what is FlexPac? Simply put, it is an affordable way for your organization to acquire Flex System solutions, which can help lower your total cost of ownership (TCO). Flex System is a CI solution that goes beyond blades with a no-compromise design that reduces the cost of doing business, improves agility and increases efficiency by allowing you to get the most work out of your IT systems.

The FlexPac promotion includes all the components needed to build a VDI solution:

Flex System chassis, which houses all the components needed to run the solution including integrated networking, connectors, power distribution units (PDUs) and fans to keep everything cool. The net is that the chassis helps keeps the IT environment simple.

Flex System x240, which is ideal for a broad range of workloads including virtualization, cloud and business applications. Fourteen (14) x240 compute nodes can fit into a single Flex System chassis. More info on the x240 is here.

Flex System x222 is a unique offering. Each x222 is two independent servers designed to take a single bay in the Flex System chassis. With this dense design, a Flex Chassis can hold up to 28 independent servers. This makes the x222 ideal for dense environments with workloads such as infrastructure applications, file serving and security apps. More info here.

Flex System x280 X6: This is part of the high-performance X6 portfolio and ideal for databases, CRM, ERP and other mission-critical workloads. More info here.

Top of Rack networking: FlexPacs are designed to scale with your needs. As your needs grow, you may have to add a top-of-rack (ToR) switch to your environment. FlexPac offers a 10Gb ToR Switch (G8264CS) and a 40Gb ToR Switch (G8332) for extreme performance.

Finally, management. The Flex System Manager (FSM) is an optional component. The FlexPac offering includes the FSM hardware, plus license of a single chassis and support for up to one year. More info on the FSM is here.

As with any other offer, there are certain conditions. With FlexPac, you can configure up to three chassis with up to 15 total compute nodes in a low-priced FlexPac solution. Additional components may be added to the configurations using regularly available pricing methods. No substitutions can be made in chassis or node configurations except to upgrade memory using parts that qualify for this program. These limits are per customer.

Minimum

Maximum

Flex Chassis Configurations

1

3

x240, x222 or x280 Compute Node

1

15

Flex System Manager Node (FSM)

0

1

ToR networking

1

No limit

How to buy: Contact your Lenovo representative or Lenovo authorized business partner and ask about FlexPac from Lenovo. This is a limited time offer. As always, feel free to contact me at dtareen@lenovo.com with any questions on this blog. Thanks for reading.

The Need:
With a huge amount of money at stake, financial markets firms are in a constant arms race to minimize end-to-end latency and seize fleeting market opportunities ahead of the competition.

The Solution:
With Redline solutions on 32-core compact System x3750 M4 servers, based on the Intel® Xeon® processor E5-4600 v2 family, firms can reliably achieve ultra-low latency and predictable performance. Clients can deploy their entire trading system on 32 cores in a single 2U System x3750 M4 server.

Fisher, wrapped it up by saying “The IBM System x3750 M4 continues to be one of the servers we recommend to clients, based on the strength of its performance and also its reliability, compactness, efficiency and build-quality. These qualities mean that our clients can be confident of getting the expected performance out of their mission-critical trading systems at all times.”

Benchmark Performance
The x3750 M4 previously delivered record-breaking performance for the STAC-M3™ Benchmark as performed by the Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC®). The x3750 M4 beat the competitive systems with at least two times better performance in 14 of the 17 response-time benchmarks, The x3750 M4 also set a new record for NBBO (National Best Bid and Offer) performance, beating the next best published performance by 38%.

It's a proud day here at Lenovo! After months of research, development and testing, we've released REACHit - the newest member of our DOit Apps family.

Like it’s sister app SHAREit, REACHit was conceived as a way to make your digital life a little bit simpler - by giving you a single dashboard that lets you search for files across all of your cloud services (like Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and Box) and all of your devices (like your home laptop, your work PC, your tablet, your mobile) at once.

That's right. No matter what device you're on, you can use REACHit to find a file on any other device you have, or in any cloud storage service we support. And it's completely free on any Android or iOS device and Windows PCs.

We hope you're excited to get your hands on REACHit for a test drive, and we'd love to hear your feedback on the app in the comments section below. Here's a short list of the things you should know about REACHit to get started.

1. REACHit works on Android, iOS and Windows devices

If you're reading this and have a Lenovo PC, phone or tablet, awesome. We're thankful to have you as a customer. We also understand that most people have different brands of tech for different needs. With REACHit, you can install it on an Android-based phone like a Samsung, and on an iPad, and on your Windows 7 or 8.1 PC, for example - any combination of Android, iOS and Windows is possible.

2. You can connect Google Drive, Dropbox, Box and OneDrive

When you first launch REACHit, you'll be able to connect to your cloud storage accounts just by entering your login credentials. If you have more than one Google Drive account, like one personal account, one for work, and one for a group project, you could connect and search across all three. You'll no longer have to remember multiple logins to quickly find files. You can just set it up once and use REACHit from here on out.

3. When should you use REACHit?

There's a lot of ways you can use REACHit. Here's a few to get your wheels turning:

When you're at the office and you want to listen to music from your home PC

When you're at the airport on your smartphone and want to grab a video from your tablet

When you know you started a list called "Holiday Gifts" but you can't remember when, where or how you saved it

When you need to copy a lot of files from one cloud storage account to another

The list goes on and on. Send us a tweet sometime and let us know how you use it.

4. You can edit files directly in REACHit

REACHit is integrated with Zoho, a simple file editor similar to Google Docs or Open Office. If you need to edit a document, spreadsheet or presentation you can do that directly in REACHit and save it back to the cloud or to your device. When you right click on a file, you'll see an option called "Open With". In that menu you'll find the option to open and edit with Zoho.

5. You can add REACHit’s search engine to the taskbar

When you have REACHit running on your PC, you can add it to your taskbar. When you use this for your search, it will read all of the locations that you set up in REACHit in the app.

6. The REACHit web app has a local folder

By default, when you launch REACHit on your PC you’ll see some folders – My Documents, My Videos, My Music, My Pictures and REACHit – already accessible in your dashboard. The REACHit folder has two functions:

1. When you open a file from the cloud or another device, it gets stored locally in the REACHit folder

2. If you copy files into the REACHit folder on your PC, you can access them through the web app

7. Change your REACHit settings to search your entire hard drive

When you first start using REACHit on your PC, you’ll only be searching the default folders that load (My Documents, My Videos, My Music, My Pictures and REACHit). This is so you won’t be overwhelmed by seeing all of your PCs files in your dashboard. If you want to turn on the ability to view and search all of your PC’s hard drive, you can launch settings from the REACHit icon in the taskbar, and enable “Show Me Everything”.